First, keep an eye on your payment gateway's or PSP's typical UPI API response time in real time. Since the majority of billing engines currently record transaction latency, use this data to establish a dynamic threshold. For example, slowing mode should be activated if the average response time for more than 10% of active requests is greater than 2 seconds. Your billing engine should lower the amount of concurrent UPI calls during this slowness mode by modifying the internal rate limiters or message queue dispatch interval, basically, stopping queue workers for a short while.
Retry throttling should then be incorporated into your payment process. Use exponential backoff, so each subsequent retry waits longer than the previous one. For instance, five, fifteen, and forty-five seconds—instead of retrying every unsuccessful UPI payment right away. To avoid synchronized spikes caused by numerous people trying at once, add jitter, a random delay. This guarantees that whether the PSP or the UPI network is under very high strain, your system stays stable.
Another option is to set up a circuit breaker rule, which will automatically stop new UPI payment attempts for a short while (say, two to five minutes) if a predetermined number of consecutive UPI failures occur (for example, five or more within thirty seconds). Show a message like ""UPI is currently responding slowly, please try again or use another method"" and direct consumers to other payment alternatives (such cards or netbanking) during that outage.
Lastly, record any throttling incidents and reaction times in your dashboard. To visualize latency trends and notify your operations team when the billing engine enters slowness mode, you can incorporate tools like Datadog, Grafana, or New Relic.