contention

One is a write burst of terabytes in a minute followed by half an hour of silence; the other is a steady read that never stops and never spikes. Provisioning for the peak of the first wastes most of its capacity, and provisioning for the average of the second fails the moment a checkpoint lands.

Two ends, two access patterns, and one design choice that removes almost all contention. Why the owner takes the newest task and thieves take the oldest, what that does to cache locality, and the measurement showing why this cannot be demonstrated in Python at all.