It's more indicative of your nodes not able to service requests because they are busy or overloaded. In my experience when you see the number climbing because of peak load, the latency tends to show issues too. Other symptoms of the load issue are higher-than-normal pending reads and writes. The high memory utilisation is also a side-effect of the high traffic load. At its worst, you'd be seeing read/write timeouts or connection failures on the client side. Cheers!
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