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It sounds like common sense, but a lot of people use the queue as a means to widen the neck, or rather the current perceived (and measured!) bottleneck they have. Usually there is another bottleneck hidden deeper in the system, and that one is the one that will cause all kinds of terrible issues.

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Absolutely. That's what I meant in saying that if people are experiencing it, they don't understand or can't measure their real problem.

I think a more helpful slant for the original post would have been focusing on determining the root cause, as opposed to going into great detail on why queues were not a solution to the problem. (Especially when they might be part of a reasonable solution to the root cause.)

Yeah, the text that goes behind that post in chapter 3 of http://www.erlang-in-anger.com focuses a lot more on finding the underlying true bottleneck, but I didn't feel like re-writing the same thing in many places, differently.

So I headed for a queue rant, because at least that way I only have to link to the blog post when I end up discussing these issues in the context of queues.

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