Why Queues Don’t Fix Overload (And What To Do Instead)
Summary
Article explains why queues are not a cure for overload and shows how unbounded buffers lead to a latency death spiral. It emphasizes backpressure and load shedding as the correct approach, using Little’s Law to illustrate why shedding load at the source is essential. It also introduces Tina, a bounded, zero-allocation concurrency framework, and demonstrates how synchronous rejection and timeouts enable predictable, graceful degradation.