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42 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
42 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
---
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type: claim
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domain: internet-finance
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description: "Replacing non-stationary arrival rates with constant staffing leads to systematic over- or under-provisioning"
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confidence: proven
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source: "Whitt et al., 'Staffing a Service System with Non-Poisson Non-Stationary Arrivals', Cambridge Core, 2016"
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created: 2026-03-11
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---
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# Time-varying arrival rates require dynamic staffing not constant MAX_WORKERS because using average or maximum rates as constants creates systematic misallocation across the arrival cycle
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Non-stationary arrival processes — where the arrival rate itself changes over time — cannot be efficiently staffed with constant worker counts. Whitt et al. demonstrate that replacing time-varying rates with either the average rate or the maximum rate produces badly mis-staffed systems:
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- **Constant = average rate**: Under-staffed during peak periods, leading to queue explosions and service degradation
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- **Constant = maximum rate**: Over-staffed during off-peak periods, wasting capacity and compute resources
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The optimal approach tracks the arrival rate over time and adjusts staffing dynamically to match the current load plus an appropriate safety margin (scaled by peakedness for non-Poisson processes).
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## Evidence
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- Whitt et al. (2016) prove that time-varying arrival rates require time-varying staffing levels for efficiency
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- Constant staffing at maximum capacity wastes resources during low-traffic periods
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- Constant staffing at average capacity fails catastrophically during burst periods
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- Dynamic staffing based on current queue state and arrival rate estimates achieves both efficiency (no waste during quiet periods) and reliability (adequate capacity during bursts)
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## Application to Teleo Pipeline
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Teleo's research processing pipeline exhibits strong non-stationarity: research dumps and futardio launches create burst periods with 15-20+ simultaneous arrivals, while other periods see minimal activity. Using a fixed MAX_WORKERS setting (constant staffing) is the worst of both worlds:
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- During bursts: MAX_WORKERS is too low, queue explodes, processing stalls
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- During quiet periods: MAX_WORKERS is too high, workers sit idle, compute wasted
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Dynamic worker scaling based on current queue depth and estimated arrival rate (with peakedness adjustment) is the theoretically correct solution.
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---
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Relevant Notes:
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- [[square-root-staffing-formula-requires-peakedness-adjustment-for-non-poisson-arrivals]]
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- domains/internet-finance/_map
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Topics:
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- core/mechanisms/_map
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