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Backpressure handling

When your loader phones home faster than the licensing server can respond, you need backpressure. This recipe shows the token-bucket pattern we ship inside the Meridian C++ runtime.

Token bucket at a glance

  • 1.Capacity — max burst size (e.g. 5 requests).
  • 2.Refill rate — tokens added per second (e.g. 1 token / 2 s).
  • 3.Take — consume 1 token per outbound call. If bucket is empty, queue or drop.

Circuit breaker integration

Pair the token bucket with a circuit breaker. After three consecutive failures, open the circuit for 30 seconds. All requests during the open state fail fast — no wasted threads, no cascading timeouts.

Offline grace cache

When the server is unreachable, fall back to an HMAC-signed grace cache stored on disk. The cache is valid for a configurable window (default 72 hours) and prevents the loader from blocking the user during transient outages.