A margin computed at the wrong level of abstraction doesn't fail where the old threshold said it would: it fails a third of the way there. This post generalizes Post 2's single-resource redline to a genuinely multi-resource setting, finds the real byte-level exhaustion point sits at roughly a third of the slot-based Sedimentation Threshold, not at the threshold itself, and checks that finding against a structurally unrelated argument reaching the same qualitative warning from a different direction: Price of Anarchy, a nonlinear equilibrium-inefficiency metric that spikes near saturation in a real production system, not a second measurement of the same quantity.
Eight agents complete a benchmark worse than four, at 2x the token cost. The equation that predicts this was written in 1993 for parallel databases — and it governs CPU caches, engineering teams, and AI swarms with identical math. This post proves it at all three layers, then hands you the instrument: given your measured alpha, kappa, and role error weights, compute the topology before you spawn the first agent.
Building the data layer that enables 1M+ QPS with sub-10ms reads through L1/L2 cache hierarchy achieving 85% hit rate. Deep dive into eCPM-based auction mechanisms for fair price comparison across CPM/CPC/CPA models, and distributed budget pacing using Redis atomic counters with proven ≤1% overspend guarantee.