The Journey of a Request to the Backend

The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser

From the frontend through the kernel to the backend process
When we send a request to a backend most of us focus on the processing aspect of the request which is really just the last step.

There is so much more happening before a request is ready to be processed, most of this step happens in the Kernel. I break this into 6 steps, each step can theoretically be executed by a dedicated thread or process. Pretty much all backends, web servers, proxies, frameworks and even databases have to do all these steps and they all do choose to do it differently.

Grab my backend performance course https://performance.husseinnasser.com

0:00 Intro

3:50 What is a Request?

10:14 Step 1 - Accept

21:30 Step 2 - Read

29:30 Step 3 - Decrypt

34:00 Step 4 - Parse

40:36 Step 5 - Decode

43:14 Step 6 - Process

Medium article

https://medium.com/@hnasr/the-journey-of-a-request-to-the-backend-c3de704de223