To make things more concrete, consider the SEDA paper from SOSP 2001: “SEDA: An architecture for well-conditioned scalable internet services”. I love this paper, it defines and solves an important problem: “A service is well-conditioned if it behaves like a simple pipeline: as the offered load increases, the delivered throughput increases proportionally until the pipeline is full and the throughput saturates; additional load should not degrade throughput.