What today's software owes to Bronze Age clocks

Admission control determines whether software work should proceed based on factors such as permissions, capacity, priority, or concurrency, and the text traces one common mechanism, the leaky bucket, from ancient water clocks and Athenian court time limits to modern network and API rate limiting. In software, leaky or token buckets track the amount of admitted work and replenish capacity over time, allowing bursts while enforcing a sustainable average rate; Shopify’s GraphQL API is presented as an example that prices requests by estimated query cost and exposes bucket state to clients. The piece argues that databases particularly need pre-execution admission controls because systems such as Postgres and MySQL can attempt more work than they can safely handle, while existing timeout settings often act only after resources have been consumed. It introduces PlanetScale’s Database Traffic Control for Postgres as a system that uses tagged queries and resource budgets to warn on or block work before execution, estimating query costs from plans and historical behavior and applying settings for server share, burst capacity, per-query limits, and concurrent workers.

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