Optimal Stopping at the Edge of a Limit Cycle
Post 3 cited a paper this series can't quietly set aside: threshold-based eviction, proven dynamically unstable under saturated demand, a worst-case limit cycle that costs up to half of throughput. This post takes on the population Blood Oath was built to exclude from that result (tasks that can actually be evicted) and asks the two questions Post 3 left open: is a single eviction worth its cost, and is running that rule as a policy, at scale, safe from the instability Post 3 only watched from the outside. It also checks a third: would a fleet-wide coordinator make a better call than the local rule this post proves optimal on its own terms: and the answer splits in two, one physical reason coordination can't help the ranking decision itself, and one real, unpriced reason it still might help pace evictions across nodes sharing the same fabric.