[evanj]

This is a good point, although I don't think I said "connections", I said "requests". The definition of requests is going to vary significantly. Yes, very slow clients are yet another problem that extremely robust systems don't have to handle.

In my personal case, nearly all of my work has always been on "internal" services that are being used inside a single organization inside a data center, where this is rarely a problem. This is much more of an issue for services that are accessed over the public Internet, where you need to handle malicious attackers as well as users that have horrible connections.

In any case, I believe what I wrote still applies, but you do need to set appropriate timeouts (yet another parameter to tune; yuck!)