L124: C-core: Server-wide max_outstanding_streams

L124-max-outstanding-streams.md

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+Title
+----
+* Author(s): Siddharth Nohria <siddharthnohria>
+* Approver: Craig Tiller <ctiller>
+* Status: Draft
+* Implemented in: C++
+* Last updated: 2025-05-12
+* Discussion at: https://groups.google.com/g/grpc-io/c/8HIUfWZewPo
+
+## Abstract
+
+Allow servers to set a server-wide `MAX_CONCURRENT_STREAMS` as part of the
+Resource Quota, in addition to the current per-connection `MAX_CONCURRENT_STREAMS`.
+
+## Background
+
+HTTP2 protocol provides the `MAX_CONCURRENT_STREAMS` setting as a way to limit
+the number of concurrently open streams on any single connection between a
+client and the server.
+
+But this in itself is not good enough to protect the servers from too many
+concurrent streams; a client can just create create more connections to the same
+server, and be allowed to effectively send more concurrent streams.
+
+In addition to the overload risk due too many connections, another limitation of
+a per-connection `MAX_CONCURRENT_STREAMS` is that it is static in nature. For
+servers where the number of clients might be dynamic, this is sub-optimal. When
+there are only a few clients connected to the server, the server might be able
+to server more concurrent requests from each of these clients. So a
+per-connection limit set to deal with overload situations (with 1000's of clients)
+might be sub-optimal in situations with only a small number of clients.
+
+## Proposal
+
+Introduce `StreamQuota` as part of the `ResourceQuota` on the server side. Users
+can set the `max_outstanding_streams` in the `StreamQuota`, which will be equally
+distributed among all open connections to the server. If the user also specifies
+a per-connection `MAX_CONCURRENT_STREAMS`, that will also be respected as an
+upper bound.
+
+## Implementation
+
+Implemented in https://github.com/grpc/grpc/pull/39125.