Article: The Mathematics of Backlogs: Capacity Planning for Queue Recovery (opens in new tab)

Backlogs in distributed systems are arithmetic problems, not mysteries. This article provides practical formulas for calculating backlog drain time, sizing consumer headroom, and setting auto-scaling triggers. It covers key failure modes — retry amplification, metastable states, and cascading pipeline bottlenecks — plus when to shed load instead of draining. By Rajesh Kumar Pandey