Infrastructure Burst Bottleneck (Agent Scale-Out)
Anti-pattern: deploy agents whose scale-out behavior triggers sudden data-and-compute bursts that on-prem or under-provisioned cloud infrastructure cannot absorb; agents work at small scale and freeze in production.
Problem
The agent works fine at pilot scale (10–100 RPM). At production scale (1000+ RPM) the underlying infra saturates — Postgres connection pool exhausted, vector store latency spikes, embeddings backlog grows. Agents start queueing on infra, response times grow from 5s to 5min, retries amplify the saturation. Differs from orchestrator-as-bottleneck (which is the orchestrator process); this is the *upstream-infra* saturation.
Solution
Map the agent's fan-out shape (number of concurrent sub-agents × calls per sub-agent × per-call infra cost). Load-test the dependency tree at projected fan-out. Provision burst capacity. Use connection pooling with circuit-breaker fallback. Throttle agent fan-out at the orchestrator when infra signals back-pressure. Pair with circuit-breaker, rate-limiting, and graceful-degradation.
When to use
- Never. Cite when reviewing agent-rollout capacity planning.
- Capacity-test the full dependency tree at projected fan-out.
- Provision burst capacity sized to agent fan-out depth.
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