Why Queues Don’t Fix Overload (And What To Do Instead)
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Unbounded queues don't fix overload — they delay and amplify failure. Using Little's Law and the bathtub analogy, this post explains how unbounded queues cause latency death spirals: as arrival rate exceeds processing capacity, queues grow, clients time out and retry, dead requests consume CPU, and the system collapses catastrophically. The only real solution is explicit load shedding and backpressure. The author illustrates this with Tina, a thread-per-core actor framework built in Odin, where every mailbox is strictly bounded (256 messages by default), rejections are O(1) and synchronous, and developers are forced to handle overload at the call site rather than deferring failure to downstream timeouts.
