Round 6 hit account-level rate throttling the concurrency AIMD cannot
absorb: at 26 req/min the gateway still returned 16% 429s and each one
burned a third of the retry budget. Retry-After-guided 429s now back
off without consuming attempts (gRPC pushback semantics); the retry
loop gains a per-call ceiling using the same dual-condition stall
verdict as quota-wait (local window exceeded AND no global progress).
Round 5 left three residual failure classes; ladder exhaustion (3.2%
of structured calls with a single re-ask) and 429 leakage (5.8%, AIMD
oscillating above the sustainable point) are addressable: re-ask
default goes 1 to 2 (conservative vs instructor's 3) and the AIMD cut
factor drops to 0.5.
Round 3 showed unconditional yield-after-two-failures pushes the third
attempt onto known-bad sources in heterogeneous pools (83% vs 10%
expected success). OutcomeAwareSelector now exposes health(); a failed
source only yields when some untried candidate scores at least half its
health. Health-blind selectors keep the unconditional rule.
P6 round 2 showed routing convergence turns account-level 429s into
the binding constraint (62% throttle rate at full concurrency). Each
source now carries a local AIMD limit: multiplicative cut on 429,
additive growth on success. Over-limit picks queue via the existing
quota-wait poll instead of burning retry budget or tripping the
circuit-open verdict.
iomgaa