- BACKOFF_CAP 300 → 60: Steward reads a host stale after 180 s, so an agent
backing off to five minutes read stopped long after Steward came back
(lesson #4355: a check-in inherits its call's backoff).
- A POST carries at most five samples: the oldest four buffered plus the
new one, the rest held for the next post. A backlog drains a few at a
time instead of in one post Steward cannot write before the timeout
(the loop measured in #5149).
- Per-container Docker work has a 20 s deadline over the whole fan-out.
Past it the sample reports docker_status "error" ("N of M containers
not read within 20 s") and no list: a partial list would read as
removals, and a record without its inspect as restarts.
- /system/df is asked every 600 s rather than every sample; Steward keeps
the last answer.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>