Splendor protects shared backends — full-text search, the vector store, and the embedding and reranking providers — by shedding load when they are saturated, rather than letting requests pile up.
Capacity shedding
When a backend is temporarily at capacity, the request returns 503 with a structured error code and a Retry-After header:
The codes you may see under load:
semantic_search_capacity_exhausted — semantic search is saturated.semantic_provider_capacity_exhausted — the embedding or reranking provider is saturated.cold_search_capacity_exhausted — cold-tier (archival) search is saturated.
Backing off
When you receive a 503 with Retry-After, wait at least that long before retrying, and apply exponential backoff with jitter if it persists.
Capacity errors are transient — retrying after the indicated delay almost always succeeds. Treat them differently from 4xx errors, which require changing the request.
