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Reliability

Load Shedding

Rejecting requests immediately under overload rather than queueing them.

Why interviewers ask about it

Rejecting in 1 ms beats timing out in 30 s: a fast rejection frees resources on both sides, while a slow timeout holds them on the client and the server.

Related terms

Backpressure

Signalling upstream to slow down when a consumer cannot keep pace.

Circuit Breaker

After N consecutive failures, stop calling a dependency for a cooldown, then probe with a half-open state.

This term is part of the free System Design interview preparation module - browse the full glossary for every definition.