System Design · Senior · Question 60 of 75

What is load shedding?

✓Correct answer: Deliberately rejecting some (lower-priority) requests when overloaded so the rest still succeed
2Turning off servers at night
3Deleting old data

Explanation

Failing fast with 503 beats slowing everyone down until all requests time out. Prioritize critical paths like checkout.

Further reading

Google SRE: Handling Overload ↗

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