The most important thing to understand about queues (2016)
I like the author's solution (always use bounded queues) because it usually forces you to confront back-pressure up front. It doesn't matter how big your queue is, your system must be designed to work at peak throughput essentially without a queue, and thus your system must handle the possibility that an event fails to be processed and must be retried/dropped. Queues <i>only</i> serve to mitigate bursts.<p>It's annoying but also understandable how often people just dump stuff into an unbounded queue and punt on making sure things work until the system is falling down. Often queues are more of a tool developers and operators can use to navigate unknown performance characteristics and scale later than they are a requirement for the actual system itself.