Buffer degrades under backlog

The wall

A buffer that stops absorbing exactly when the backlog it exists for arrives — whether the buffer's substrate degrades under the backlog, or its access semantics let the backlog capture the buffer. 5 teams hit this wall; the breakdowns below are the evidence.

Same wall, 5 systems

Patterns in this class

• Checkpoint-Bounded Scans
• Circuit Breaker
• Database-as-a-Queue
• Dead Letter Queue
• Durable Front Buffer
• Fault Isolation
• Fetch-Execute Decoupling
• Queue with Guaranteed Delivery
• Retry with Backoff and Jitter
• Selective Acknowledgment
• Single-Writer Ownership
• Universal Staged Rollout

Every breakdown