This is a neat little technique and the fact that the developers did this puts nodes.js higher in my stack of "technologies to consider".
A harder problem is to solve the same "melt-out" problem for the entire gamut of servers that are usually found in large serving stacks (various web servers, relattional and nosql db servers etc). The users are usually not the developers of these pieces of technology and there's never enough dev-bandwidth available to actually implement self-tuning techniques like the one mentioned here.
For such situations I once came up with a "little" trick to limit the damage in sudden overload situation. It allows the admins of said servers to tune the threadpool and request queue lengths in an intelligent way (with the help of historical performance data that most shops should have). I mentioned it in this discussion thread here:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Whats-generally-used-methodol...
A harder problem is to solve the same "melt-out" problem for the entire gamut of servers that are usually found in large serving stacks (various web servers, relattional and nosql db servers etc). The users are usually not the developers of these pieces of technology and there's never enough dev-bandwidth available to actually implement self-tuning techniques like the one mentioned here.
For such situations I once came up with a "little" trick to limit the damage in sudden overload situation. It allows the admins of said servers to tune the threadpool and request queue lengths in an intelligent way (with the help of historical performance data that most shops should have). I mentioned it in this discussion thread here: http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Whats-generally-used-methodol...