Watchdogs vs. Snowflakes

That a system can randomly jam doesn’t just indicate a serious bug in the system; it is also a major source of risk. You don’t say what your distributed job-control system controls, but let’s just say I hope it’s not something with significant, real-world side effects, like a power station, jet aircraft, or financial trading system. The risk, of course, is that the system will jam, not when it’s convenient for someone to add a dummy job to clear the jam, but during some operation that could cause data loss or return incorrect results. I rather suspect that having a system like this jam while coordinating, for example, the balancing of electrical power across a power grid would have spectacular and perhaps fatal results.