Exponential vs Linear: How to Tell If Your Event-Driven Trigger Is Looping

Exponential vs Linear: How to Tell If Your Event-Driven Trigger Is Looping The Core Idea When you're building rate limits for event-driven triggers, you face a fundamental problem: how do you set a threshold that catches loops without blocking legitimate high-volume workloads? The answer is that loops and legitimate traffic have fundamentally different growth characteristics: Legitimate triggers scale linearly with user actions. 1 user creates 1 order → 1 trigger execution 50 users create 50 orders per minute → 50 trigger executions per minute The ratio is always 1:1. Trigger executions track user actions. Recursive loops scale exponentially from a single user action. 1 user creates 1 record → trigger fires → function creates another record → trigger fires again After 10 seconds: 100+ executions After 60 seconds: 700+ executions All from 1 user action. The trigger is its own input. This isn't a subtle distinction. It's the difference between a line and an exponential curve. And it mean