[Hercuros]

In an interactive application, you probably don't want to allow the user to queue up 30000 actions that will then slowly get executed over the next, say, 10 minutes. That would mean there is an extremely large delay between taking a UI action and seeing the result of that action (because the other 29999 actions have to be handled before the latest one can be handled). That's also why some applications display a progress spinner and block you from interacting with the UI further (of course that's not always ideal either, you might want to have some small queue and optimistically update the UI already).

If they are just batch background tasks (i.e. there is no expectation of seeing some immediate UI update as a response), then having a larger queue might be fine. There's not really that much reason to put a (small) limit on say the number of files to be downloaded in a queue. And having a really large queue bound is not that dissimilar from having an arbitrarily large queue (limited be memory of course), in terms of buffer bloat and added latency.

[amelius]

> If they are just batch background tasks (i.e. there is no expectation of seeing some immediate UI update as a response), then having a larger queue might be fine.

"Larger" is not good enough; you really want an unbounded queue (unbounded in theory of course), because otherwise the GUI thread might block at some point. Unless you want to spend a lot of effort on exception handling (at which point unbounded is still the best choice, see below).

Also, unnecessary restrictions in your program might cause problems in the future when your software is ported to a larger architecture, or when demands change.

[dundarious]

The point is there should always be appropriate backpressure. For a GUI, lockup would be inappropriate backpressure. More appropriate would be some interactive backpressure -- even a modal spinning wheel is better than queuing additional rage-clicks driven by user frustration at slowness, that are all wasted.

[gpderetta]

There are bo truly unbounded queues. As some point your application will start trashing swap or trigger OOM. Backpressure is always the right solution (but if course sizing queues is hard).