Stress-Testing the Outbox — 10,000 Messages Per Second and a Dead Broker

We built it. We found the edge cases. Now we push it until something breaks — and measure exactly where the limits are.

There's a particular quality to the silence in a room when you pull the network cable out of a running message broker.

I don't mean physical silence — the fans keep spinning, the drives keep writing. I mean the silence on the monitoring dashboard. The message rate graph, which was a steady river of green at 2,000 events per second, drops to a flat line. …