An examination of several approaches to handling overload, flow-control, and backoff, with examples drawn from Erlang/OTP programming.

[…] there is a rich zoo of overload problems and potential solutions […] ranging far beyond a simple queue boundary for mailboxes. By reasoning and looking at your system, it becomes interesting to figure out which approach is best: a small system with some relatively infrequent load-spikes may be fine with a queue or a pull-based mechanism. An all-synchronous system may be fine with simple counter-based protection for most tricky cases. […]