Backpressure connects a consumer’s limited capacity to the behavior of its producers. A full channel may make a producer wait, reject new work, or apply a deliberately chosen shedding policy. The important property is that the limit changes what upstream components do. A growing queue or a dashboard showing lag is evidence of imbalance, but neither is automatically a mechanism that controls admission. ...
Linux can invoke an out-of-memory killer when an allocation cannot be satisfied within its relevant constraints after appropriate reclaim attempts. It is a last-resort recovery mechanism, not an application priority scheduler. Some allocations fail without a kill, and configuration can instead lead to panic behavior. Start an investigation by identifying the allocation scope and recorded event, rather than declaring that the machine must have exhausted every byte of RAM. ...
Clock synchronization reduces disagreement between machines’ civil-time readings. It supports certificate validity checks, timestamp interpretation, and many expiration policies, but it does not establish a perfect global clock. A host can emit well-formatted UTC while measuring the wrong instant. Applications still need to distinguish elapsed durations, absolute deadlines, and causal ordering rather than making them all depend on raw wall-clock comparisons. ...