Problems / Agents and tools, medium

Workflow engine overload

Deterministic steps run on a workflow engine with 6 slots (200 ms each) between the agent’s decisions.

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Your goals

Success ≥ 95% of tasks, p99 ≤ 90 s.

The traffic

10 requests a second for 45 seconds: 100% task (writes).

The system

What each component does in this design, and what calls it. The simulator mimics each one from these settings.

ComponentIts job hereSettings
Load balancerLoad balancerTraffic enters here.Calls Agent API.Layer 4 balancers route by IP and port; layer 7 balancers read HTTP and can route by path or header.–
Agent APIApp serviceLoad balancer forwards to it.Calls Agent orchestrator.Little's law: throughput ≈ concurrency ÷ latency. 200 slots at 50 ms serve about 4,000 req/s.3 replicas × 500 slots · timeout 180 s
Agent orchestratorAgent orchestratorAgent API calls it.Calls Model, Workflow engine.An agent loops: think, call a tool, read the result, repeat until done.400 slots · 6 steps
ModelLLM endpointAgent orchestrator calls it.Latency has two parts: time to the first token, then a steady stream of tokens per second.1000 streams
Workflow engineDurable workflow engineAgent orchestrator calls it.Workflow engines like Temporal persist every step, so long processes survive crashes.6 slots · 1 steps

Hints

Try it first. Open one hint at a time if you get stuck.

Hint 1

Workflow runs a second = tasks × steps.

Hint 2

Agent work multiplies: tasks a second × steps per task = calls a second on every tool the loop uses.

One way to solve it

Give the workflow engine more capacity.

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