I don't recall seeing this explanation before, though I'm pretty sure I've read a version of it. What I noticed immediately was what I felt was something missi

I don't recall seeing this explanation before, though I'm pretty sure I've read a version of it. What I noticed immediately was what I felt was something missing in explanation of fallacy #1 (The network is reliable), something I predicted decades ago when the network gear salesmen first came around to try and convince us to replace our aging concentrators (multiport hubs) with fancy new switches: losing the backpressure mechanism of collisions would lead to bandwidth-related failures. The article's explanation mentions the reliablity of modern switches but makes a fairly shallow dismissal of this by referencing things like pulled power cords but spends most of the text actually talking about WAN reliability. What I've seen in practice is, including with (maybe even especially with) distributed computing environments, is the scenario I proposed to the salesperson way back when: What happens when two servers send data out of their network ports at full line speed (100Mb/s) each, at the same time, for a total of 200Mb/s, to another server's network port that can only receive 100Mb/s? Of course, once the switch's buffer fills up, half the packets get dropped, and it's not practically deterministic which half. In a distribute environment, where the number of sources greater than 2 and the number of sinks is greater than 1, it gets even less so and often more intermittent.