Really interesting comparison between Quix Streams and Pathway — the typed support argument for choosing Quix Streams resonates a lot. I've been running data processing pipelines on a Mac Mini (64GB unified memory) and the IDE autocomplete experience makes a massive difference when you're debugging streaming logic at 2am.

One thing I've found with Kafka-based pipelines: the linger.ms + compression combo you showed is underrated for small event payloads. We process financial transaction events where the individual messages are tiny but high-frequency, and tuning those producer configs dropped our network overhead by ~40%.

Curious about your experience with backpressure handling in Quix Streams. When the consumer can't keep up with the producer rate (especially during burst events like flash sales), does Quix handle that gracefully or do you need to implement custom buffering? With confluent-kafka I had to build a manual pause/resume mechanism based on lag monitoring, wondering if Quix abstracts that away.