Resource Overload

Attackers deliberately exhaust an agent's computational, memory, or external-service capacity — including self-triggered task spawning and multi-agent coordination — to degrade performance or cause failure. In a multi-agent system: An attacker bombards a multi-agent research system with requests that trigger every specialist agent simultaneously, exhausting…

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Content type

Concept

Theoretical construct: explains a term, principle, or mental model.

Classification level

Structure

What organizes, connects, or makes decisions possible.

Available perspectives

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360°

In brief

Resource Overload in brief

Resource overload is the exhaustion of computing time, memory, network, cost, or model budgets through unbounded processing.

Where does it come from?

The pattern comes from capacity planning and denial-of-service protection; OWASP applies it to generative and agentic systems as unbounded resource consumption.

The mental model

Every request consumes a limited budget. Without time, size, concurrency, and cost limits, a call chain can grow until availability or economic viability breaks down.

Key building blocks

Core idea

The term captures this component’s central purpose and key decision.

Mechanism

The component connects clear information with a verifiable decision or action.

Practice context

Application context, responsibilities, limits, and evidence determine practical quality.

When is it useful?

Resource limits protect agent platforms from loops, cost explosions, and availability loss. Timeouts, quotas, and concurrency limits belong at every external action; overly tight limits can abort legitimate long tasks.

OWASP LLM10 Unbounded Consumption

Why is this building block relevant?

Attackers deliberately exhaust an agent's computational, memory, or external-service capacity — including self-triggered task spawning and multi-agent coordination — to degrade performance or cause failure.