Interactive Systems Explainers

Queue Congestion Playground

See why latency explodes when incoming work exceeds processing capacity.

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Queue congestion experiment controls

Key Observations

What to Notice

What you are seeing

Particles are tasks. They arrive from the producer, wait in the queue, run through one worker, and disappear when complete.

Why latency grows

When arrivals are only a little faster than processing, waiting work accumulates. Each new task must stand behind everything already stuck.

Throughput vs latency

The worker may keep finishing tasks at the same rate while latency gets worse. Output can look stable while the line behind it grows.

When queues start dropping work

Turn on the queue limit and overload the worker. Once the line fills, new tasks bounce away instead of waiting forever.

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