Queuing in Distributed Systems

March 2021

This post is a draft. Content may be incomplete or missing.

A basic rundown of things to know about queuing when it comes to request servers and distributed systems. I don’t have a full list of topics yet, but I’m thinking of basic things like

• Basic literacy: queue depth, latency, throughput
• At QD1, latency implies throughput and vice versa. Above QD1, anything goes.
• QD1 is the fastest your system can go; above that, lock contention can start to play in
• As you hit your system’s throughput limit, you get arbitrarily high queuing delays. A simple JavaScript simulator might show how this works?

I’m sure there’s other stuff worth covering here as well.