A request is a rate on a wire

Everything that moves in Too Many Requests is a request or an answer. On screen, each one is a small colored bead on a wire. It looks like a conveyor belt, with each bead an item riding to a machine. It isn’t. A wire carries a flow, like water in a pipe, and the beads are just a picture of how much is flowing.

A wire from a Gateway might carry two chats a second and half an image a second, mixed together. The more that flows, the closer the beads sit, from one lonely dot to a packed stream. The wire also gets brighter as it fills. I show this with spacing and not speed, because you can’t see speed in a screenshot.

Jams are real, though. Every wire has a limit. When too much tries to get through, requests pile up in red right where the problem is, so you can see where the fix goes.

In the clip, I add a Queue where the build was losing requests. The Queue holds the extra requests and lets them out slowly, at a pace the GPU behind it can handle.

Why not make every request a real object? There are three reasons. First, a busy wire costs the game no more than a quiet one, so a huge late-game build doesn’t slow down. Second, the same start always gives the same result, so a save loads exactly as you left it. Third, every jam you see is a real jam. Nothing moves just to look busy.

Some things don’t flow. A model never rides a wire. A Training Run fills up over time, and when it’s full, a new model is ready. Then you pick it for a GPU pool from a list.

Every request also carries the prompt a customer typed. It’s there for fun, and the game never reads it. Hover over a wire to read one.

center this div. i am begging you

a hand with five fingers. just five. please

reply to all 3,000 unread emails as me, be nice

Wrong answers show up too. Each one rides the answer wire as a small cross. So a weak model shows up as a wire full of crosses, before you even click on it.

Next time, the red packets in the chat.