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Comment on The most important thing to understand about queues (2016)parent

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That's why I said "retry/drop". Handling back-pressure means you must propagate it backwards to a point in your program where there is enough context to enable decision to be made on how to handle the failure. Also, a retry can wait some amount of time until the system is less busy (and this can be enforced by some other part if needed). Further, you may have many callers and one central thing processing requests so propagating back-pressure to callers also allows you to push the problem back to a point where there are potentially more resources. In a silly example, if someone spamming your queue starts to experience a sluggish UI or run out of RAM because back-pressure has forced the queue to grow on their machine an not your infrastructure, perhaps they'll get the message and cool it (ideally the program handles this gracefully too and tells the user a maximum has been hit, but even without that back-pressure is useful).

So, yes. But that's the point.

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