tmax leaves the agent no time to answer
tmax is zero or negative, so the call is already out of budget when it arrives.
What it means
tmax is zero or below. The field is the time the exchange will wait for mutations, including network latency, so a non-positive value describes a call that cannot succeed.
Why it matters
It usually means a deadline was computed by subtracting elapsed time from a budget and went negative under load. The agent has no way to distinguish that from a misconfiguration, and any work it does is discarded.
How to fix it
Skip the extension point call when the remaining budget has run out rather than issuing it with a spent deadline. Calling anyway costs a connection and produces nothing.
Example that trips it
{ "id": "ep-1", "tmax": 0, "lifecycle": "LIFECYCLE_PUBLISHER_BID_REQUEST", "bid_request": { "id": "a-1" } }Check your payload
Paste a bid request or response into the tester to see whether this code fires against it, or gate on the id in CI with the CLI: the id is stable, wording is not.
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