Load Shedding is a technique used in information systems, especially web services, to avoid overloading the system and making it unavailable of all users. The idea of Load Shedding is to rather flatly ignore some requests rather than crashing a system and making it fail to serve any request.
Considerations shaping the design of load shedding algorithms include:
A popular open-source tool for defending against delays in downstream systems is Hystrix [1].
References
Load Shedding Wikipedia(Text) CC BY-SA