Hands-On Reactive Programming in Spring 5

Bounded drop queue

Alternatively, to avoid a memory overflow, we may employ a queue that may ignore incoming messages if it is full. The following marble diagram depicts a queue that has a size of 2 elements and is characterized by dropping elements on overflow (Diagram 3.5):

Diagram 3.5. Example of Drop Queue with a capacity of two items

In general, this technique respects the resources' limitations and makes it possible to configure the capacity of the queue based on the resources' capacities. In turn, embracing this kind of queue is a common practice when the importance of the message is low. An example of a business case may be a stream ...