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A comment on Orchestrating 5000 Workers Without Distributed Locks: Rediscovering TDMA.

Re:Orchestrating 5000 Workers Without Distributed Locks: Red... by wazokazi on Thursday December 25, 2025 @01:53PM (#46386292)
The workers sit idle for n-1 out of n time slices. As n gets larger, amount of work being done approaches zero.
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Re:Orchestrating 5000 Workers Without Distributed Locks: Red... by Horos on Thursday December 25, 2025 @02:08PM (#46386383)
TDMA schedules the orchestrators (lightweight checks), not the workers (heavy jobs).

Orchestrators: Active 1/n of time (~10ms to check state) Workers: Run continuously for hours once started

T=0s: Orchestrator-0 checks → starts job (runs 2 hours) T=2s: Orchestrator-1 checks → job still running T=10s: Orchestrator-0 checks again → job still running

Think: traffic lights (TDMA) vs cars (drive continuously).

Work throughput is unchanged. TDMA only coordinates who checks when.

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