System insight
Idempotency vs throughput in event systems
The fastest path is often not the safest path; this note frames where to enforce idempotency.
- Theme
- consistency boundaries
- Published
Idempotency is cheap in architecture diagrams and expensive in production timelines.
A practical strategy:
- Enforce idempotency at externally visible state transitions.
- Keep internal transformations replay-friendly, but avoid global dedup where it is not needed.
- Measure queue-age and duplicate-rate together; optimize one without the other can hide regressions.