Flood control (communications)

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Flood control" communications – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (February 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

In communications, flood control is a feature of many communication protocols designed to prevent overwhelming of a destination receiver.^[1] Such controls can be implemented either in software or in hardware, and will often request that the message be resent after the receiver has finished processing.

Internet forums often use a flood control mechanism to prevent too many messages from being posted at once, either to prevent spamming or denial-of-service attacks. Internet Relay Chat servers will often quit users performing IRC floods with an "Excess Flood" message.