Capacity boundaries can cause which of the following?

Capacity boundaries can significantly impact system performance and reliability, and one of the key consequences of reaching these boundaries is application failure. When an application operates beyond its intended capacity—such as insufficient memory, processing power, or storage—it may not be able to process requests efficiently. This can lead to responses that are delayed or entirely missed, ultimately resulting in the application being unable to handle its expected workload. When critical resources become exhausted, the application may crash, leading to a complete failure in functionality, and thus disruption of services for users.

While factors like latency, API abends, and request drops can also occur due to capacity constraints, they represent different facets of how a system manages—or fails to manage—efficiency and performance under load. Latency typically describes delays in response times, which can occur without a complete failure of the application. API abends (abnormal ends) may involve specific parts of the application crashing without affecting the entire system. Request drops indicate that some requests are not being processed at all, which can happen under heavy load but does not inherently mean the application has failed. Application failure, however, represents a more drastic and broader outcome of exceeding capacity boundaries, encompassing all these issues.