Backpressure

Protect Node from accepting more work than it can finish.

safety

Detailed Description

Backpressure prevents a Node service from accepting unlimited work. Without it, queues grow, memory rises, downstream systems overload, and requests eventually timeout.

Use concurrency limits, bounded queues, rate limits, and 429/503 responses. A controlled rejection is much healthier than letting the whole process collapse.

Mental Model

queue depth high
-> reject/rate-limit
-> recover before timeout storm

When To Use

->Downstream DB or API saturates
->Workers keep timing out
->Queues grow without bound

Tools: Bottleneck, p-limit, BullMQ concurrency, HTTP 429

backpressure.js

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Output

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