It helps but doesn&#x27;t quite answer my question yet.<p>With your situation #1, what if this is very common transaction  and therefore you have 100 of these all waiting.  What about 1000, 5000 etc.  what system resources are used to let these transactions wait indefinitely ( if I understand your semantics with specific regard to blocking )?<p>Some systems handle this as a failure that is communicated to the client rapidly.  Other systems let N clients actually wait indefinitely but at the cost of taking up a thread &#x2F; file descriptor, etc. in systems that have finite amounts of threads for example this would then be communicated in his paradigm as a such of upper bounds as to how many requests one could have waiting.<p>So just trying to get a feeling for how this could have infinite amount of waiting transactions due to partial failure and still keep taking requests.<p>Thanks for the reply, this stuff is always interesting