Backpressure in Distributed Systems (blog.pranshu-raj.me)

Off topic: a guaranteed way to start a flame war in an automotive forum is to state that there is no such thing as "backpressure" and that fluid dynamics and the continuity equation fully explain why restricting exhaust pipe diameter results in increased performance.

Light the fire and then sit back and enjoy.

I feel like backpressure was a common topic in 2010, and now modern event driven system design just naturally handles this issue.

I have often found limiting the buffer size as a simple way to communicate back to producers that more work can't be taken. Then what happens is all a producer strategy to drop work or wait for a period of time then drop or just hold onto the work until the buffer has a clear space. Its about the simplest message from consumer to producer you can do and how games tend to do backpressure and how Go channels work.

Hi, author of above blog here.

Thanks for posting, I'm glad you found this interesting.

Would be glad to know any feedback or requests you have, to improve further.

This whole topic seems to be a re-discovery of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_theory and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_dynamics with non-linearities and saturation.

In the same vein, on the consumer side we talk of admission control (which is just another name for "drop incoming messages") and throttling...