Synchronous Chain Trap

Kind: anti-pattern

Layer: Enforcement Core

Aliases: Blocking Synchronous Chains

Record: architecture:synchronous-chain-trap

Severity: discouraged

Scope: modularity

Formed by: Build deep request-time chains across services or modules, making latency, availability, and failure behavior multiplicative.

Canonical: Ontology

A defect in which one request depends on a deep chain of blocking synchronous remote calls, so one slow link stalls the whole request.

Listed in Architecture principles, after Cyclic Deployment Dependency and before Chatty Interface.

Refactored by

• Coarse-Grained Endpoint
• Introduce Async Event
• Query Projection
• Timeout Pattern
• Bulkhead Pattern

Severity

• discouraged

Category

• Anti-patterns

Force

• Modularity

Violates

• Independence
• Asynchronous Communication
• Microservices

Negated by

• Asynchronous Communication

Linked from

• Anti-patterns
• Core Modular Design
• Event / Messaging / Asynchronous Architecture
• Codebase / System Architecture Styles
• Contracts / Interfaces / Compatibility
• Event Messaging Async
• Severity levels
• The forces