Reject Agent Tasks Before Queue Age Breaks the SLO

Short summary

Queues that accept work past its deadline guarantee failure. The article proposes admission-time backpressure using predicted queue age, per-tenant limits, and task-class-specific service time estimates. It includes pseudocode for an admission function, metrics to track, and a test plan covering both false-accept and false-reject scenarios.

• •Calculate predicted wait using queued work seconds divided by effective worker concurrency, not raw queue length
• •Admit only when predicted wait plus p95 service time plus safety margin is under the task deadline
• •Enforce per-tenant queue budgets and track both false-accept and false-reject rates to tune estimates

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