# Not All AI Agents Are Equal: Characterizing Resource and Performance Dynamics

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19947 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19947/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 13 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/agents/general-llm-agent-frameworks-and-benchmarks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06770/) (2023)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [Measuring Coding Challenge Competence With APPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09938/) (2021)
- [BigCodeBench: Benchmarking Code Generation with Diverse Function Calls and Complex Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15877/) (2024)
- [QASC: A Dataset for Question Answering via Sentence Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11473/) (2019)
- [RankRAG: Unifying Context Ranking with Retrieval-Augmented Generation in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02485/) (2024)
- [Blended RAG: Improving RAG (Retriever-Augmented Generation) Accuracy with Semantic Search and Hybrid Query-Based Retrievers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07220/) (2024)
- [The Cost of Dynamic Reasoning: Demystifying AI Agents and Test-Time Scaling from an AI Infrastructure Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04301/) (2025)
- [Get Experience from Practice: LLM Agents with Record & Replay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17716/) (2025)
- [A Cost-Benefit Analysis of On-Premise Large Language Model Deployment: Breaking Even with Commercial LLM Services](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18101/) (2025)
- [AgentCgroup: Understanding and Controlling OS Resources of AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09345/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

LLM-based AI agents process user requests through iterative reasoning and tool execution, often involving the invocation of remote LLM APIs with local tool containers. This execution model can make the optimization of agent serving difficult because latency, local resource demand, and container bottlenecks inter-mix across requests. However, the current agent ecosystem runs without much consideration of resource dynamics, which results in significant waste of the precious resources. This paper analyzes the resource inter-mix of AI agents for three representative tasks: retrieval-augmented question answering, web search, and software coding. To this end, we characterize the latency with respect to the resource dynamics of processing multiple requests and tasks concurrently. Our measurements show that agents have a wide range of behaviors depending on tasks, so that even the same tool can differ substantially in resource dynamics. We also find that running multiple requests concurrently exposes task-dependent bottlenecks in resource dynamics such as CPU, disk I/O, and memory. Furthermore, we uncover that faster LLM responses or more CPU cores do not always accelerate agents. Based on these observations, we demonstrate new optimization opportunities that exploit the resource dynamics of tasks: CPU-aware tool admission and task-aware CPU allocation. Our results show that the latency of CPU-sensitive agent tasks improves ~5.4×, and the average latency across multiple tasks is reduced ~32% compared to native agents.