What is Throttling? — UK Software Development Guide
Direct Answer
Throttling is the process of deliberately slowing down or limiting the rate of requests or resource usage to maintain system stability and prevent overuse. API throttling limits how frequently a client can call an API (similar to rate limiting). System throttling reduces processing speed when resources are constrained to prevent complete failure. Throttling is a graceful degradation mechanism.
Throttling in the UK
Throttling has UK FCA operational resilience relevance. Rather than a complete service failure under extreme load, throttling causes graceful degradation — some requests are slowed or queued, but the service continues to function for most users. This supports the FCA impact tolerance requirement: if a service can throttle rather than completely fail during peak load, the impact tolerance (maximum acceptable downtime) can be maintained. UK GDPR: throttled API responses must still handle personal data requests correctly — rate-limited SARs must be queued and fulfilled, not silently dropped.
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