Developers sometimes ask if there's a way to slow down an MQTT message sender to stop it sending PUBLISH packets faster than the receiver (be it a server or client) is able to process them.

The receiver can apply back pressure at the TCP/IP level (if it's a TCP/IP transport) or - for QOS 1 and QOS2 - it can delay sending acks so that eventually the sender's inflight message window will fill up, but these mechanisms are a bit crude, and the receiver has no in-band way of letting the sender know what rate is acceptable to it.

We need to decide whether this is a problem that affects a significant number of existing or envisaged real-life applications (as opposed to performance and stress tests)