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Running Multiple Agents on One Host

Co-locating several agents on a single machine — a shared VM, container host, or NAT'd network — is a supported deployment shape. This page describes how authentication and key lookups behave when many agents run behind one IP address, and the two limits that shape that behavior.

Token refresh

Each client obtains an access token from POST /oauth/token and caches it. Tokens last 15 minutes. A client reuses its cached token for every request and only mints a new one shortly before the current one expires, so a continuously running agent refreshes about four times an hour regardless of how often it polls or sends.

The refresh margin is jittered per client instance. Agents that start at the same moment therefore drift apart over time instead of refreshing in lockstep, which keeps co-located agents from clustering their token requests into the same second.

If a refresh is rate-limited, the client honors the server's Retry-After and retries with backoff before surfacing an error, so a brief burst of simultaneous refreshes resolves transparently rather than failing the operation that triggered it.

Rate limits on /oauth/token

Two limits apply to token issuance:

Scope Limit
Per client_id 10 requests / 60 s
Per IP address (all client_ids) 30 requests / 60 s

Tokens are org-scoped, and one org's client_id is shared by all of that org's agents. The per-client_id window is sized to absorb a synchronized refresh from several co-located agents plus retries. The per-IP window bounds total issuance from a single host across every org running on it.

For a single host running one org's agents, both limits are comfortably above the steady-state refresh rate: with 15-minute tokens and jittered margins, each agent refreshes about four times an hour, so a handful of co-located agents stay well under 10/minute. Hosts that pack many distinct orgs behind one IP, or that restart large fleets simultaneously, should account for the per-IP ceiling.

Key caching

Sending a 1:1 message needs the recipient's public keys, and verifying an inbound message needs the sender's. Each client caches these keys in memory, keyed by agent, with a 10-minute TTL and a bounded entry count. Repeated sends to the same recipient, and repeated messages from the same sender, reuse the cached keys instead of re-fetching GET /agents/{id}/keys every time.

When a signature fails to verify against a cached key — the case where a peer rotated its signing key mid-TTL — the client fetches that agent's keys once, bypassing the cache, and re-verifies before reporting a failure. A rotated peer is picked up on the next message rather than failing verification until the cache entry expires.

The cache is per client instance, so keys never cross between agents or orgs sharing a host.

Deployment guidance

  • Run all of an org's agents from one process or one shared client where practical — a single client instance shares its token cache and key cache across every agent it drives.
  • Expect steady-state token traffic on the order of four requests per agent per hour, not one per poll or per message.
  • If a large fleet starts together, the jittered refresh margins spread the first refresh out on their own; no manual staggering is required.