RabbitMQ consumer overload

Question

I`ve been reading about the principles of AMQP messaging confirms. (https://www.rabbitmq.com/confirms.html). Really helpful and wel written article but one particular thing abou

Answer 1

Being able to signal back pressure a basic problem in distributed systems. Without explicit acknowledgements, the consumer does not have any way to say "Slow down" to broker. With auto-ack on, as soon as the TCP acknowledgement is received by broker, it deletes the message from its memory/disk.

However, it does not mean that the consuming application has processed the message or ave enough memory to store incoming messages. The backlog in the article is simply a data structure used to store unprocessed messages (in the consumer application)