Writing about backend engineering, distributed systems, fintech, and lessons from building software that handles millions of records daily.
Most people think disks are slow. So how does Apache Kafka — a system that persists data to disk — handle millions of messages per second? The trick is not that Kafka avoids disk. The trick is how it uses the operating system and disk I/O patterns efficiently.
Understanding how Spring Boot processes HTTP requests internally is critical for building scalable applications and diagnosing performance issues. This article examines the complete request processing pipeline, from TCP connection establishment through application response generation, with detailed analysis of Tomcat’s NIO connector architecture, thread coordination, and system behavior under load