Apparatus and method for processing requests from an external queue in a TCP/IP-based application system

Abstract

A TCP/IP-based application system includes an application module that performs predetermined functions based on external requests received from an external queue. The external queue is external to the application system and stores the external requests before the requests are fetched into the application system. A network interaction module is coupled to the application module and the external queue (1) to fetch the external requests from the external queue into the application system and (2) to determine which, if any, of the fetched requests will not be processed by the application module based on the processing capacity of the application module and the rate of the external requests arriving at the external queue such that when the application module is overloaded, TCP timeouts for requests stored in the external queue are minimized and the chance of those requests stored in the external queue from being dropped is also minimized.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.