[StavrosK]

Yes, I'm saying that they could have just served 500s to clients (even ones with regular log files), which would have backed off and retried later. Essentially what the "chillout" method does too, but it doesn't sound like the author had considered it.

[smaddox]

I'm guessing the answer is that inserting a feature to serve 500 to a fraction of the incoming requests would have required a similar amount of effort as just enabling the chillout feature.