As an engineer, you probably know that server performance under heavy load is crucial for maintaining the availability and responsiveness of your services. But what happens when traffic bursts overwhelm your system? Queueing requests is a common solution, but what's the best approach: FIFO or LIFO? In this post, we'll explore both strategies through a simple simulation in Colab, allowing you to see the impact of changing parameters on system performance. Comparing the pros and cons of each approach helps to build an understanding of the trade-offs and make better calls about queueing strategies, improving your engineering skills in the process. After all, as the saying goes: "I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand."
Model
To compare the performance of FIFO (which processes requests in the order they are received) and LIFO (which prioritizes the most recent requests) queueing strategies, we'll build a simple model using a Client that generates requests and a Server that handles them. You can find the details in this Colab. The essential characteristics of the model are: