1. A computer program product, comprising: a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium having computer-readable program code embodied therewith, the computer-readable program code comprising: computer-readable program code configured to provide a plurality of processing elements comprising one or more operators, the operators configured to process streaming data tuples; computer-readable program code configured to establish an operator graph of a plurality of operators, the operator graph defining at least one execution path in which a first operator of the plurality of operators is configured to receive data tuples from at least one upstream operator and transmit data tuples to at least one downstream operator; computer-readable program code configured to provide, for each of the plurality of operators, a buffer configured to hold data tuples requiring processing by the respective operator, wherein the buffer is a first-in-first-out buffer; computer-readable program code configured to receive, in a first buffer associated with a first operator, a plurality of data tuples comprising at least one attribute; computer-readable program code configured to determine that a backlog of data tuples exists in the first buffer; computer-readable program code configured to select at least one data tuple from the first buffer; computer-readable program code configured to examine at least one attribute of the selected at least one data tuple to identify at least one candidate tuple; and computer-readable program code configured to perform a predefined operation on the at least one candidate tuple, the predefined operation comprising: reordering the at least one candidate tuple based on an attribute value of the at least one candidate tuple; and removing the at least one candidate tuple from the buffer.