High-Concurrency Architectural Design: The Trio of Caching, Rate Limiting, and Degradation

Background

The rapid growth of the internet industry and the surge in user numbers have put immense concurrent request pressure on systems. Software systems aim for three main goals:

• High performance
• High concurrency
• High availability

While these three aspects are distinct, they are also interconnected and encompass a wide range of topics. A comprehensive discussion on these could take days and nights, but this article focuses specifically on high concurrency and caching.

Challenges of High Concurrency

Performance Degradation

When a system faces high concurrency, it means that a large number of requests are being processed simultaneously. This can lead to slower processing times as the system’s resources (like CPU, memory, and network bandwidth) are divided among these numerous requests. As a result, the overall performance of the system can decrease, leading to slower response times.