What you are seeing
Particles are tasks. They arrive from the producer, wait in the queue, run through one worker, and disappear when complete.
Interactive Systems Explainers
See why latency explodes when incoming work exceeds processing capacity.
Key Observations
Particles are tasks. They arrive from the producer, wait in the queue, run through one worker, and disappear when complete.
When arrivals are only a little faster than processing, waiting work accumulates. Each new task must stand behind everything already stuck.
The worker may keep finishing tasks at the same rate while latency gets worse. Output can look stable while the line behind it grows.
Turn on the queue limit and overload the worker. Once the line fills, new tasks bounce away instead of waiting forever.
Interactive Systems Explainers
Watch routing choices shape overload, queues, and recovery.
See how retries can amplify overload and collapse a system.
See how fast failure isolates unstable services and allows recovery.
Add workers automatically when the queue grows, then watch the system catch up.
Watch synchronized cache misses overload a database, then tame them with protection.