# Graceful degradation

> Keeping the important part of a service working when it is over capacity by turning off the expensive, optional parts instead of failing everything: the page still loads, and the report waits.

Reliability

## In Quorum

Graceful degradation research adds a switch to an App Server. A saturated Node then drops its dearest request kinds first, exports and uploads before reads, so the cheap kinds keep their latency (10). Load shedding is the other order: it drops the least valuable kinds first, bots and ad bids before pages.

## Design

[Reliability track](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/design/10-progression.md#track-reliability)

## Read next

[Load shedding](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/glossary/load-shedding.md), [Backpressure](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/glossary/backpressure.md), [Utilization](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/glossary/utilization.md), [Bulkhead](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/glossary/bulkhead.md)

## Learn more

- [Google SRE book: Handling overload](https://sre.google/sre-book/handling-overload/)

## See also

- [Glossary](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/glossary.md)

Source: https://wiki.playquorum.dev/glossary/graceful-degradation