"""
In case the number of tomcat threads and acceptCount values are set to be too high, a sudden increase in traffic will fill up the OS queues and make all the worker threads busy. When more requests than that can be handled by the system are sent to the machines, this "queuing" of requests is inevitable and will lead to increased busy threads, causing cpu starvation eventually. Hence, the crux of the solution is to avoid too much queuing of requests at multiple points (OS and tomcat threads) and fail fast (return http status 503) as soon the application's maximum capacity is reached. Here is a recommendation for doing this in practice:

Fail fast in case the system capacity for a machine is hit.
"""