Key Suspended Mid-Batch: The First Ten Minutes

Why this moment matters

A batch job that has been running cleanly suddenly returning auth errors is a different problem from a job that never started. Part of the batch is already done, part is in flight, and the retry layer is usually making things worse. The first ten minutes should answer three questions in order.

• Is this a key suspension, an exhausted balance, or something transient?
• How do I stop the retry loop from burning time and requests?
• Can this run be salvaged, or should it be queued for replay?

Work through them in that order. Skipping ahead leads to either a pointless replay or a long wait for nothing.

Step 1: Stop the bleeding before diagnosing

Pause the producer, not just the worker. If the job pulls items from a queue, stop enqueueing new work first. Otherwise every diagnosis minute adds more failed items to the backlog.

• Disable automatic retries or set them to zero for the affected key.
• Let in-flight requests finish or time out; do not kill them mid-call unless the client supports safe cancellation.
• Record a timestamp and the last successfully completed item ID. This is your replay boundary.

Step 2: Distinguish suspension from an empty balance

Both surface as auth-style failures, but they resolve differently.

• Suspension is a state on the key itself. Every request with that key fails, including a minimal one-line test call. The failure is immediate and consistent.
• Exhausted balance usually appears once the account can no longer cover the next charge. Behavior can vary: some failures look like auth errors, others look like quota errors. A small test call may still succeed briefly, or fail with a different message.
• Transient faults are intermittent. Retrying the same tiny request succeeds within a short window.

A quick discriminator: send one minimal request with the same key from a separate process. If it fails the same way every time, treat it as a key-state problem, not a load problem. Check your account balance and key status in the console rather than guessing from error text alone.

Step 3: Read the error body, not just the status code

Auth-adjacent failures often share a status code but carry different messages. Log and inspect the raw response body for one failing request.

• Note whether the message references the key, the account, or quota.
• Check whether the error is returned by the gateway or upstream; that hints at where the state lives.
• Compare with a request made through a second key on the same account, if you have one. If the second key works, the problem is scoped to the first key.

Step 4: Decide salvage versus replay

Once you know it is a key suspension, the run cannot continue on that key. The decision is about the work already done.

• Salvage when the remaining items are few, idempotent, and you have a healthy key ready. Resume from the recorded boundary with a small concurrency cap and watch the first few results.
• Replay when the batch is large, outputs are partially written, or downstream steps depend on ordering. Drop the in-flight shard, keep completed results, and requeue from the last confirmed item.

Rules of thumb:

• Never replay items whose outputs were already persisted; deduplicate by item ID on write.
• Treat the in-flight shard as unknown. Assume its outputs are missing and re-run it.
• If outputs feed a downstream aggregation, mark the run as partial until replay completes.

Step 5: Make replay cheap and safe

A replay should reuse the same idempotency keys and item IDs so duplicate writes collapse instead of corrupting state.

• Version your prompts and model choice per item so a replay reproduces the same request.
• Store the request parameters alongside the output for auditability.
• Cap concurrency lower than the original run; a replay is not the time to discover new failure modes.

Step 6: Close the loop on spend

Suspended keys and replay both affect cost accounting. Before restarting, confirm what was actually charged for the failed segment. On this platform, usage is billed at official price times 1.3, and key contributors are credited official price times 1.1 (premium models times 1.2) in USDC. Failed auth calls should not consume model usage, but partial successes before the suspension may have. Reconcile the boundary timestamp against your usage log so the replay does not double-bill completed work.

A ten-minute checklist

• Pause producers and retries.
• Record last good item ID and timestamp.
• Fire one minimal test request; compare against a second key.
• Inspect the raw error body.
• Check key status and balance in the console.
• Classify: suspension, balance, or transient.
• If suspension: switch keys, replay from boundary, deduplicate on write.
• Reconcile usage for the partial segment before resuming.