What today's software owes to Bronze Age clocks

This post details the implementation and configuration of PlanetScale's Database Traffic Control feature, which acts as an admission control system for Postgres. It explains the historical context of leaky bucket algorithms and their application in software, particularly for rate limiting and queuing. The post elaborates on the three main settings for resource budgets: server share and burst limit (token bucket), per-query limit, and maximum concurrent workers. It highlights how these settings allow for granular control over database traffic to prevent overload and ensure system health, and emphasizes the importance of reasoning about expected failure states when implementing such controls.