mediumSystem Design

What is backpressure and how do you handle it?

Q: What is backpressure and how do you handle it?

## Backpressure **Backpressure** is what happens when a **producer is faster than its consumer**: work piles up. Handled badly, the buffer grows without bound and the service runs out of memory and crashes. Backpressure is the **mechanism that signals upstream to slow down** (or sheds load) instead of collapsing. Producer (fast) bounded queue <text class='d-sub' x='240' y='90' text-anc

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Explain backpressure.

backpressure

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Bounded queue applies backpressure

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import queue, threading, time

q = queue.Queue(maxsize=3)         # bounded -> put() blocks when full

def consumer():
    while True:
        job = q.get()
        if job is None:
            break
        print("  processing", job)
        time.sleep(0.04)           # slow worker
        q.task_done()

threading.Thread(target=consumer, daemon=True).start()

for i in range(1, 7):
    q.put(i)                       # BLOCKS when full -> natural backpressure
    print("enqueued", i)
q.join()
print("done")

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