.NET Architecture & System Design Interview Question #141

What is load shedding?

Resilience, Rate Limiting, Health Checks & Observability Senior Advanced

Quick Interview Answer

Load shedding intentionally rejects or drops work when a system is overloaded so it can preserve capacity for requests it can successfully serve.

Detailed Explanation

Load shedding intentionally rejects or drops work when a system is overloaded so it can preserve capacity for requests it can successfully serve.

It is often better to fail a portion of traffic quickly than allow all requests to become extremely slow and cause cascading failures. Priority, endpoint criticality, and retry behavior should be considered.

Code Example

Incoming load > safe capacity
        |
shed low-priority work
        |
preserve critical operations