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