I always wonder how a server like google server receive thousands of request from people at once! I understand the signals are passed through fibernet cable, but won’t those signals collide ? Or how can some small wire handle soo many requests at once ? iin my mind a wire can only take one request at a time. I know these happens close to light speed, but still! its very hard to understand.
In: Technology
Think of a mail room in a building. Each request is a letter coming in.
The postal service has large vehicles that can bring large numbers of letters in at the same time. The letters are all sealed, so even though there is a huge pile of mail, they don’t get mixed up.
There’s a large number of clerks in this mailroom attacking this mountain of mail. Each clerk processes a single letter at a time. One by one, each letter is opened and read. Some letters might get immediate responses (like “sorry, your letter is unintelligible; please send another”), and those are written, sent back out, and forgotten about. But most require the clerks to make inquiries further into the building to other departments. It’s a huge building, so they have no idea what the other departments do; those departments might ask other departments, and sometimes they might need to write letters and send them to other faraway buildings. So it could take a long time for an inquiry to get an answer.
Do clerks sit and wait for the responses to those requests? No. They put the letters aside and start working on the next ones. Each one might have a pile of letters they’ve started work on but don’t yet have the answers for.
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