> ("Because," the backend dev thinks, "why would clients want a response after 100s? They've probably given up and gone home already at that point.") Or worse:

> ("Because," the backend dev thinks, "why would clients want a response after 100s? They've probably given up and gone home already at that point.") Or worse: they might have given up on this request and issued another one. When you have a problem that might be caused by (or exacerbated by) overload and might cause heavy retrying (by the user and/or automatically at one or more layers), you want to give up on the requests that are least likely to matter. Deadlines are a standard way to do that. Other ways include propagating cancellation through the stack, sheddable request categories, and queue disciplines like adaptive LIFO. Anyway, I agree with everything you wrote, and I want to point out that whatever deadlines they have in the system are probably helping more than they're hurting. Of course I can't be sure of that without knowing the nature of the outage.