find the theoretical limit to what your web server can handle in terms of concurrent requests. Let's throw them all at your application. In this scenari

find the theoretical limit to what your web server can handle in terms of concurrent requests. Let's throw them all at your application. In this scenario, the check-load-then-die code is worthless because the request will never get there. If there is such a limit, then why not mitigate that by setting a max number of connections for the webserver? You're just shielding the web server from whatever the application holds. True. But as I said: it works. Never seen our server get slow since we implemented this a few years ago. It kicks in when we get about 25x our normal traffic. Which happened less then once a year so far.