Sequential agent chains are a latency tax — the event-driven pattern that makes independent agents run in parallel

Описание и применение

Поток из пяти независимых агентов, построенный как последовательная цепочка, приводил к избыточной сериализации и увеличивал время выполнения почти в пять раз. Перепроектировав систему на событийно‑ориентированную архитектуру, автор позволил независимым этапам работать параллельно, сократив задержки и улучшив наблюдаемость, но увеличив сложность эксплуатации.

Задача

A multi‑agent pipeline built as a linear chain caused unnecessary serialisation, inflating wall‑clock time by up to five times.

Результат

By shifting from a sequential chain to event‑driven concurrency, the author eliminated unnecessary serialisation, reduced latency, and gained visibility into back‑pressure and ordering, while accepting increased operational complexity.

Рабочий процесс

• 1. Researcher fetches multiple sources independently.
• 2. Analyst performs separate analyses on fetched data.
• 3. Writer compiles final output once all upstream data is available.
• 4. Fact‑checker verifies claims independently of earlier stages.
• 5. Formatter formats the final document. In the new design, each agent subscribes to the specific events it needs and processes them as soon as they arrive.

Доказательства

I once watched a nine-minute agent workflow spend seven minutes and forty seconds doing nothing.

Источник

The math is unforgiving. If you have N stages with average latency L, your wall-clock time is N × L. If K of those stages are independent, the floor is (N − K) × L + L, not N × L.

Источник

In a sequential chain, work starts because the previous step finished. In an event-driven architecture, work starts because the data it needs has arrived.

Источник

Cisco's CAIPE runs multi-agent orchestration across Argo CD, Kubernetes, and Komodor, where agents chain across tools and respond to cluster events rather than polling in sequence. Their reported outcome: response times dropped from hours to seconds, with MTTR reduced by up to 80%.

Источник