sheddingprocesser

Sheddingprocesser is a conceptual software component that enforces load shedding in information systems. It aims to protect system stability by discarding or deprioritizing less critical work when demand exceeds capacity. The term is not universally standardized and may appear in discussions of system design, resilience patterns, or performance engineering rather than as a formal artifact.

It typically comprises three elements: a monitoring layer that collects metrics such as request rate, queue depth, CPU and memory usage; a decision engine that applies policies to determine when shedding should occur and what to shed; and an action layer that enforces the decisions by rejecting requests, delaying tasks, capping throughput, or applying prioritization rules.

Operation often involves thresholds, adaptive policies, or dynamic backpressure. Sheddingprocesser can be soft, by delaying noncritical work or reducing quality of service for lower-priority tasks, or hard, by rejecting new work or terminating in-progress tasks when safe. Some designs implement rate limiting or circuit-breaker signals to upstream components to prevent cascading overloads.

Common use cases include web services under traffic spikes, real-time data processing pipelines, and distributed microservice architectures. A sheddingprocesser helps maintain latency targets and error budgets for critical paths, at the cost of increased latency or reduced throughput for nonessential tasks. Designers must balance fairness, user experience, and data integrity when selecting shedding strategies.

Relation to related concepts includes load shedding, back-pressure, rate limiting, and circuit breakers. It is often implemented as part of resilience patterns in cloud-native and microservice ecosystems, and may be customized to domain-specific priorities.