I've got a client who's expecting a plug on national TV tonight, and they just told me (love how that works, eh?). I'm trying to do some capacity planning in what little time I have, and the one thing I think I should try would be some form of "out of capacity" page.
The idea is to (a) define a threshold that says, "this is what overloaded means", (b) compare current load with [a] on each request, and if current load >= [a], (c) show a 503 page.
The thing is, I have no idea what this is commonly known as, so Google searches have turned up very little. I know of mod_qos for Apache, but this client is on nginx, and I haven't been able to find an equivalent for nginx.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!