Interactive Systems Explainers

A compact atlas of systems behavior.

Explore nice interactive playgrounds for queues, retries, overload, pools, locks, caches, and recovery. Change inputs, watch the particles, and build intuition by poking the system.

Start Exploring

Open Load Balancer first and watch traffic move through a distributed system.

Traffic & Congestion

How systems behave under pressure, overload, retries, and recovery.

Traffic & Congestion

Load Balancer

Open

Watch routing choices shape overload, queues, and recovery.

Traffic & Congestion

Autoscaling

Open

Add workers automatically when the queue grows, then watch the system catch up.

Traffic & Congestion

Queue Congestion

Open

See why latency suddenly explodes when work piles up.

Traffic & Congestion

Circuit Breakers

Open

See how fast failure isolates unstable services and allows recovery.

Traffic & Congestion

Cache Stampede

Open

Watch synchronized cache misses overload a database, then tame them with protection.

Traffic & Congestion

Retry Storms

Open

See how retries can amplify overload and collapse a system.

Databases & State

How queries, locks, pools, and shared resources affect performance.

Databases & State

Database Connection Pool

Open

Watch finite connections create waiting, latency, and saturation.

Databases & State

Lock Contention

Open

See how multiple workers accessing the same resource can block concurrent work.

Databases & State

N+1 Queries

Open

See how one API request can explode into hundreds of database queries.