Yes, though there's no "just" about it in many cases. If you kick the client out at an early enough stage in processing that the shed requests are only 1% as costly, then 3x retries aren't going to be able to cause a significant CPU spike. I would have liked to see how the simulation behaved, though, because I don't have empirical evidence for exactly what the traffic would look like.

You can also configure your client to stop retrying if it sees a load shedding error. That won't protect you against traffic that overwhelms the load shedder, but it's pretty effective against an innocently misbehaving client.