[convolvatron]

it doesn't matter. as long as there is a rate mismatch over a sufficiently long timescale, queues will build up and consume memory, latency will increase, and depending on how things are structured overall throughput will go down because of scheduling overhead and memory pressure.

this is actually an inherent problem _within_ horizontally scaled services that have cross dependencies.

so no, you should really implement backpressure.

[tootie]

"sufficiently long timescale" is long enough to figure out a solution :)

But seriously the question was "ideal solution". Not everyone can do it but just right-sizing compute and removing or offloading bottlenecks is entirely possible. So is just throwing in the towel and discarding excess load. Reddit does that all the time and their IPO was a big success. You can also scale to accommodate massive headroom by just throwing money at it. There are plenty of systems where response times are mandatory and any back pressure mitigation that slows traffic is unacceptable.