Your agent is slow — tracing shows the model usually isn't the bottleneck
aureliatech · reddit · 2026-11-10
An engineer who builds enterprise AI agents (founder of AI consultancy Aurelia Innovatives) shared findings on Reddit from tracing agent call latency: when an agent is slow, the model is often not the main story.
Where time actually goes:
- Sequential tool calls that could have run in parallel
- Retrieval re-ranking far too many candidates
- A planning step on a large model when a smaller one would suffice
- Retries waiting on overly loose timeouts
Final answer generation is usually a smaller part of the wait than expected. What helped him: tracing every step, giving each step a latency budget, streaming the final answer, and moving classification/routing to a smaller model. He asks the community whether they set per-step latency budgets or one end-to-end target, and what surprised them most when tracing slow agents.
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