Bounded Queue
A queue whose element count cannot exceed a fixed capacity, turning overload into an explicit wait, rejection, or load-shedding decision instead of unbounded memory growth.
An apparently unbounded queue can hide overload by converting excess work into rising latency and memory pressure. A bounded queue makes that limit explicit: once full, producers must wait, work must be rejected, or another shedding policy must take over.
Capacity is not just an element count. Service time, deadlines, burst size, and consumer throughput determine whether a given bound protects latency or merely moves the bottleneck. Queue stability in ASR systems is a concrete real-time example of this trade-off.