[sly010]

Software often has built in back pressure. Most IO syscalls block, TCP surely does, so everything built on TCP does. Belt is memory. The full belt equivalent of software is OOM. If memory allocation can't be done everything comes to a halt. We could write software that instead of crashing just sits there until memory becomes available... It's the human scale circuit breakers (request timeouts) that cause issues. I guess one has to differentiate between batch processing software and interactive request/response style software. Factorio approximates the former, not the latter, but some of the underlying concepts are still the same.