Capacity, Overload, and Graceful Degradation
When arrivals exceed sustainable service, work must queue, be delayed, be rejected, or displace other work. Unbounded buffering only postpones the decision.
Planned model
Drive a pipeline beyond capacity under blocking, dropping, prioritization, admission control, and load-shedding policies. Plot recovery after the burst ends.
Questions
- What is the true bottleneck and sustainable rate?
- Which work may be discarded safely?
- Can the system recover promptly, or does stale backlog prolong failure?
Exercise
Define overload behavior for every bounded resource in a pipeline and prove that memory use remains bounded.