jargon

Backend & systems·Resilience and failure handling

the consumer tells the producer to slow down rather than silently buffering work it cannot keep up with.

Backpressure

A mechanism by which a saturated component signals upstream to reduce its rate. The alternative is an unbounded buffer, which converts a throughput problem into a memory exhaustion problem and hides it until the process dies. Bounded queues that block or reject are the simplest form; explicit credit-based flow control is the sophisticated one.

Commonly confused with