The Journey of a Request to the Backend

From the frontend through the kernel to the backend process

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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.

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There is so much more happening before a request is ready to be processed. 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.

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In another medium post I explored step 1 and step 2 in details, let us explore the rest in this post.

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