[Tomte]

Back then I had an old SPARCstation as a second computer with Debian, running INN (a Usenet news server) and Exim (mail server), both fed by UUCP over TCP.

That was long after UUCP was used seriously, but a few hobbyists still used it for fun.

Batches arrived, were decompressed and fed into Exim and INN.

That day (and the following days), batches were not decompressed before the next ones arrived. System load was through the roof.

I had never implemented or even thought about real load handling and queuing, because why should I? My few hundred kilobytes (or maybe a megabyte?) of mails and news every half hour were decompressed pretty much instantly. Until that day.