frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Backpressure in Distributed Systems

https://blog.pranshu-raj.me/posts/backpressure/
41•andection•18h ago

Comments

adamzwasserman•17h ago
Off topic: a guaranteed way to start a flame war in an automotive forum is to state that there is no such thing as "backpressure" and that fluid dynamics and the continuity equation fully explain why restricting exhaust pipe diameter results in increased performance.

Light the fire and then sit back and enjoy.

pryelluw•17h ago
It gets even more fun when the back pressure is in the intake side (aka boost). I was tuning a friends turbo 300zx after he upgraded to a bigger turbo. At the same boost levels as before the car was slower. He was confused. After a quick chat around turbos, air speed, etc., I simply told him we needed to crank up the boost. Some tweaks to timing and fuel maps and this thing could now really fly.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF•11h ago
I wanna tell them how torque vs horsepower isn't real, horsepower is all that matters unless your transmission sucks

(Not to say that the width of the power band doesn't matter)

mikert89•17h ago
I feel like backpressure was a common topic in 2010, and now modern event driven system design just naturally handles this issue.
convolvatron•17h ago
its still pretty easy to screw up. how does the system you're using handle back pressure and how does that behavior affect other parts of your system. if you have two systems that each do back pressure, are you certain that the system remains closed? that is if those systems aren't coupled implicitly through the scheduler or explicitly in some other way, then you can balloon state or drop results between them.
titanomachy•17h ago
Not all modern systems are event-driven. The large-scale systems I've worked on have plenty of RPC.
cyberax•17h ago
Backpressure applies to regular request-based systems just as well.

As in: should your request handler try to do retries if one of the dependent services fails?

normalaccess•17h ago
I recall this in the form of buffer bloat.
supportengineer•16h ago
I want to believe
PaulKeeble•17h ago
I have often found limiting the buffer size as a simple way to communicate back to producers that more work can't be taken. Then what happens is all a producer strategy to drop work or wait for a period of time then drop or just hold onto the work until the buffer has a clear space. Its about the simplest message from consumer to producer you can do and how games tend to do backpressure and how Go channels work.
pranshu-raj-211•6h ago
Can you give examples of which games have implemented this (if open source) for reference?
PaulKeeble•2h ago
It is how DirectX works. The call to present that ends the stream of the commands to the GPU and tells it to render causes the CPU to be stalled waiting for this to be possible. This causes a backpressure into the game engine as the next simulation can't start or at the very least the next frame can't be started to be processed until it returns. It has been used by GPU makers to frame pace games as well to avoid stuttering.

So its not just some games, its all games its part of the core of how DX works.

pranshu-raj-211•6h ago
Hi, author of above blog here.

Thanks for posting, I'm glad you found this interesting.

Would be glad to know any feedback or requests you have, to improve further.

ZOZO's Contact Solver (for physics-based simulations)

https://github.com/st-tech/ppf-contact-solver
1•vintagedave•18s ago•0 comments

Pomelli: Google's free tool for generating website marketing posters is amazing

https://pomelli.top
1•JoahYi•51s ago•1 comments

PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases

https://planetscale.com/blog/5-dollar-planetscale
2•ryanvogel•1m ago•0 comments

Lovable's ARR is Vanity Metric 2.0

https://pawelbrodzinski.substack.com/p/lovables-arr-is-vanity-metric-20
1•flail•2m ago•0 comments

Fantastic AWS Policies and Where to Find Them

https://iam.cloudcopilot.io/posts/fantastic-aws-policies-and-where-to-find-them
1•crescit_eundo•3m ago•0 comments

My AWS Account Got Hacked – Here Is What Happened

https://zviwex.com/posts/aws-account-hacked
1•crescit_eundo•4m ago•0 comments

Open Source Initiative now accepting your application for Executive Director

https://opensource.org/blog/open-source-initiative-now-accepting-your-application-for-executive-d...
1•mooreds•4m ago•0 comments

Tricks for Reliable Split-Second DNS Rebinding in Chrome and Safari

https://www.intruder.io/research/split-second-dns-rebinding-in-chrome-and-safari
1•crescit_eundo•4m ago•0 comments

Microsoft's AI spending draws investor concerns

https://www.reuters.com/business/microsofts-cloud-surge-lifts-revenue-above-expectations-2025-10-29/
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•7m ago•0 comments

Ionocaloric Refrigeration Cycle

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade1696
2•bookofjoe•8m ago•0 comments

Using AI and automation to migrate between instruction sets

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/systems/using-ai-and-automation-to-migrate-between-instructi...
1•sunils34•8m ago•0 comments

'Most of it is good': Tim Berners-Lee on the state of the web now

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2500499-most-of-it-is-good-tim-berners-lee-on-the-state-of-t...
2•Brajeshwar•10m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Do you negotiate salary in this job market?

3•sawirricardo•10m ago•3 comments

Antarctic expedition to find Endurance shipwreck made seafloor discovery

https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/29/science/antarctica-weddell-sea-fish-nests
1•Brajeshwar•10m ago•0 comments

Schema changes are a people problem, not a tooling problem

https://motherduck.com/blog/data-engineers-answer-10-top-reddit-questions/
1•articsputnik•10m ago•0 comments

NPM flooded with malicious packages downloaded more than 86,000 times

https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/10/npm-flooded-with-malicious-packages-downloaded-more-than...
1•Brajeshwar•10m ago•0 comments

Building on Tailscale: How we made a tiny identity provider

https://tailscale.com/blog/building-tsidp
1•gslin•13m ago•0 comments

Free software scares normal people

https://danieldelaney.net/normal/
2•cryptophreak•14m ago•1 comments

Could flashes of light in 1950s photos be UFOs? Some researchers think so

https://www.space.com/space-exploration/search-for-life/were-unexplained-flashes-of-light-in-70-y...
1•JPLeRouzic•15m ago•0 comments

Apple's Family Sharing Helps Keep Children Safe. Until It Doesn't

https://www.wired.com/story/apples-family-sharing-helps-keep-children-safe-until-it-doesnt/
1•isaacfrond•16m ago•0 comments

Substrate X-Ray Lithography, a New American Foundry

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/how-to-kill-2-monopolies-with-1-tool
1•jrk•16m ago•0 comments

A Letter to Investors from the White House Opportunities Fund

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/10/29/a-letter-to-investors-from-the-white-h...
1•andsoitis•17m ago•0 comments

Agent Labs Are Eating the Software World

https://www.nibzard.com/agent-labs
1•highfrequency•17m ago•1 comments

AI Red Teaming Guide

https://github.com/requie/AI-Red-Teaming-Guide
1•tarique192•17m ago•0 comments

An Obscure Military Program Helps Local Cops Buy Armored Card and Spyware

https://theintercept.com/2025/10/30/military-gear-police-trump-1122/
3•mikece•18m ago•0 comments

Stop Losing Money to Scope Creep: How We Keep ~100 Projects on Track

1•revolvotech•20m ago•1 comments

Computing High-Frequency Factors in Real Time for Quantitative Models

https://medium.com/@DolphinDB_Inc/calculating-high-frequency-factors-in-real-time-0c2e1cd24a58
1•CrazyTomato•20m ago•0 comments

Docs

https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/home/
1•saubeidl•20m ago•0 comments

Meta's Director of Public Policy for Israel and the Jewish Diaspora on Bans

https://twitter.com/MGN_Breaking/status/1983506898377716111
1•cramsession•21m ago•0 comments

Casual Ediff

http://yummymelon.com/devnull/announcing-casual-ediff.html
1•kickingvegas•24m ago•1 comments