When demand outruns capacity: rate limits, retries, and backpressure

When requests arrive faster than a system can handle them, it either sheds the extra load or falls over. This quiz covers the limiter algorithms (token and leaky buckets, fixed and sliding windows), where to apply a limit (per IP, per user, or in the browser with debounce and throttle), how to tell clients to slow down (429, Retry-After, backoff with jitter), and how Node.js streams push back on a fast producer so a slow consumer doesn't run out of memory.