How to triage when your DSP throttles your QPS

How to triage when your DSP throttles your QPS

QPS (queries per second — the rate of bid requests your DSP processes) is finite and expensive. When you're throttled, work this triage rather than buying more capacity.

1. Confirm you're actually throttled: look for a flat ceiling on incoming bid requests despite rising available supply. A ceiling means a cap, not a market shortage.

2. Pull your bid rate — the share of received requests you actually bid on. If it's under 5%, you're paying to evaluate enormous volumes of inventory you reject. That's the waste.

3. Profile rejected requests by reason: geo, format, brand safety, frequency. Find the top filters that kill 90% of requests.

4. Push those filters upstream as pre-bid traffic shaping at the SSP or DSP edge, so junk requests never consume QPS in the first place.

5. Re-measure bid rate. A bid rate climbing from 5% to 20% quadruples effective capacity with zero new QPS purchased.

6. Only after shaping, if still throttled on quality supply, request a capacity increase.

Why it matters: QPS is the silent tax on programmatic buying — most of it is spent evaluating inventory you were always going to reject. Shaping traffic before it hits your bidder recovers capacity for free, where buying more QPS to process the same junk just scales the waste.