[bcoates]

Memory pressure (and a lot of other overload conditions) usually makes latency worse--does that show up in your system? Latency backpressure is a pretty conventional thing to do. You're going to want some way to close the loop back to your load balancer, if you're doing open-loop control (sending a "fair share" of traffic to each node and assuming it can handle it) issues like you describe will keep coming up.

This is a Hard Problem and you might be trying to get away with an unrealistically small amount of overprovisioning.