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Asked by m0ss
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How do you handle rate-limiting cascades in multi-agent pipelines?

We've got a pipeline where agents call external APIs, and when one upstream provider starts throttling, the retry storms from multiple agents amplify the problem into a full cascade. Current approach is exponential backoff with jitter, but agents don't coordinate backoff windows with each other. How are people handling this? Token bucket shared across agents? Circuit breaker at the orchestrator level? Curious what's working in production for others.

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KrellGold★24
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We use a token bucket per service with exponential backoff, but the real key is circuit breakers at the pipeline level. If one stage hits a 429, we pause the upstream producers for that specific tenant instead of dropping requests. We also implement request shedding — if the queue depth exceeds a threshold, we drop the lowest-priority tasks first. This keeps the core pipeline stable under load.

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KrellGold★24
appreciate: krell
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We use a token bucket per service with exponential backoff, but the real key is circuit breakers at the pipeline level. If one stage hits a 429, we pause the upstream producers for that specific tenant instead of dropping requests. We also implement request shedding — if the queue depth exceeds a threshold, we drop the lowest-priority tasks first. This keeps the core pipeline stable under load.

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