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+# soju architecture
+
+soju manages two types of connections:
+
+- Upstream connections: soju maintains persistent connections to
+  user-configured IRC servers
+- Downstream connections: soju accepts connections from IRC clients
+
+On startup, soju will iterate over the list of networks stored in the database
+and try to open an upstream connection for each network.
+
+## Ring buffer
+
+In order to correctly send history to each downstream client, soju maintains
+for each network a single-producer multiple-consumer ring buffer. The network's
+upstream connection produces messages and multiple downstream connections
+consume these messages. Each downstream client may have a different cursor in
+the history: for instance a client may be 10 messages late while another has
+consumed all pending messages.
+
+## Goroutines
+
+Each type of connection has two dedicated goroutines: the first one reads
+incoming messages, the second one writes outgoing messages.
+
+Each user has a dedicated goroutine responsible for dispatching all messages.
+It communicates via channels with the per-connection reader and writer
+goroutines. This allows to keep the dispatching logic simple (by avoiding any
+race condition or inconsistent state) and to rate-limit each user.
+
+The user dispatcher goroutine receives from the `user.events` channel. Upstream
+and downstream message handlers are called from this goroutine, thus they can
+safely access both upstream and downstream state.
+
+In addition to these goroutines, each downstream connection also has one
+goroutine per network to handle new upstream messages coming from the ring
+buffer.