Comment by lkrubner

Queue theory suggests the more nodes you add to handle your queue then the longer your queue can survive (facing rising traffic) but the faster it will collapse when it finally runs out of capacity. Zach Tellman went over this in one of his talks and he had a nice graphic to demonstrate what this looks like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bNOO3xxMc0

I suppose any complex system has dynamics like that, more capacity to absorb load, but then a faster collapse when capacity is surpassed.

Hemmingway's Laws Of Motion applies:

”How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

”Two ways,” Mike said. ”Gradually and then suddenly.”

Put a bit differently by the economist Rudiger Dornbusch:

”The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.”

lifted from:

https://conversableeconomist.com/2015/01/17/the-hemingway-la...