Navigating Through the Storm

"When a system is overwhelmed with more requests than it can effectively process, a cascade of problems can ensue, significantly undermining its performance and reliability. One of the most immediate and noticeable consequences is the degradation of performance. In such scenarios, users may face frustratingly slow response times or complete timeouts in more severe cases. This not only hampers the user experience but can also erode trust in the system's reliability."

"Another critical issue is the need for more resources on requests that are doomed to fail. Many will likely time out when the system is bombarded with excessive requests. Despite this, valuable processing power and memory are consumed in attempting to fulfill these requests, leading to an inefficient allocation of resources. This inefficiency is particularly problematic during periods of high demand, as it diverts resources away from potentially successful requests."

"The situation can be further exacerbated by what is known as a ' retry storm.' This phenomenon occurs when clients, following standard protocols, automatically retry their requests after experiencing failures or timeouts. While ordinarily a useful feature, in system overload situations, these retry attempts contribute to an already overwhelming load. This creates a vicious cycle, where the increased number of requests leads to more failures, which prompts more retries, adding to the system's burden."

Managing high throughput and preventing system overload is vital for online service longevity and revenue protection. Overloads degrade performance, causing slow responses and timeouts that frustrate users and erode trust. Excessive requests consume processing power and memory on doomed requests that will likely time out, producing inefficient resource allocation. Retry storms occur when clients automatically repeat failed requests, amplifying load and creating a vicious failure-retry cycle. Memory exhaustion becomes a critical risk as systems depend on in-memory operations, further undermining capacity. Effective resilience requires limiting harmful retries, conserving resources for viable requests, and protecting memory and processing capacity.

Read at Medium