Backpressure Management

Prevent OOM crashes when producers outpace consumers.

When to Use This Skill

• Database writes slower than event ingestion
• Memory filling up with queued items
• Need to handle traffic spikes gracefully
• Want to drop low-priority data under load

Core Concepts

1. Bounded buffer - Fixed-size queue prevents unbounded growth
2. Watermarks - Thresholds trigger state changes
3. Strategies - Block, drop oldest, drop newest, or sample
4. Adaptive flushing - Adjust rate based on downstream health

State Machine