Backpressure is one of those things that can make or break a distributed system, and is handled in an amazing way by a lot of tech around us.
I recently got the chance to interact with it while building my real time leaderboard, where I had to account for this to enable clients have the best possible experience.
So what is it, really?
There’s two competing definitions.
A technique used to regulate the transmission of messages (or events, packets). The capability of producers of messages to overload consumers. (Reference to Baeldung’s blog)
Though both are correct, I prefer the second definition and will use that throughout this post.
Backpressure happens when your system can’t keep up with the amount of work being thrown at it.
Why is this an issue?
Here’s a small list of issues that can occur if backpressure isn’t handled correctly.
OOM errors (client killed due to huge memory usage on buffers)
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