Overview

If the system traffic exceeds a certain threshold, the system is overloaded, and some requests may fail. In this case, the failure triggers service retries, and the system load will increase, causing a vicious cycle. This may cause the access success rate to be far lower than the designed capacity, and even the entire system may become unavailable. Therefore, an overload protection mechanism must be designed for applications to ensure that a certain proportion of the designed capacity can be used normally in the overload state.

Overload protection helps prevent resource exhaustion caused by traffic bursts, flood attacks, or retry storms and ensure that the agreed number of requests can be processed normally in those cases.