[spartango]

This is definitely neat; it's a simple, clever way to fail somewhat-gracefully.

Interestingly, this is one piece of a broader strategy for building scalable web applications, addressed in Matt Welsh's thesis (SEDA):

http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/proj/seda/

If you haven't taken a look at the ideas in SEDA, it's definitely worth the time. Most modern web apps incorporate at least some pieces of it to great effect.

[kenshiro_o]

That's a very good technique! I did not even know about the event loop lag until now... It feels good to get a daily education from Hacker News!