A system and methodology that facilitates improving performance of a Home Subscriber Server (HSS) during overload conditions, by embedding a unique Application Session Identifier (app session ID) within multiple requests associated with a single call processing session is provided. Moreover, the system includes an overload protection component that identifies whether an incoming request is associated with previously processed requests based in part of the app session ID embedded within the incoming request. When the HSS is overloaded, the incoming requests that initiate a new call processing session and are not associated with previously processed requests are rejected/dropped before incoming requests that are associated with requests that have been previously processed.