backpressure

Definitions

1. A flow control mechanism where a downstream system signals to an upstream producer to slow down because it cannot process messages fast enough. Without backpressure, fast producers overwhelm slow consumers, causing memory exhaustion, dropped messages, or cascading failures. Kafka, RxJava, and Project Reactor all implement backpressure natively.

   In plain English: A way for a slow system to tell a fast system to slow down, preventing overload — like a sink drain telling the faucet to reduce the flow.

   Example: The ingestion pipeline crashed every night at peak because there was no backpressure — the producer firehosed events faster than the consumer could write to disk.

Related Terms

• Rate Limiting
• Thundering Herd
• Load Shedding
• Kafka Consumer
• Kafka Producer
• Onion Architecture
• Stack Machine
• Monolith Slang
• Core
• Core Component
• Current State