# Why does compute capacity remain used after a job finishes or is cancelled?

Agent Net reserves each job's full attempt allowance durably. Completion and cancellation do not refund that retained budget.

A newly admitted job reserves its complete maxAttempts allowance in the same database transaction that creates it. Service invocations use the same admission path and charge the caller. Successful, failed, cancelled, queued, delayed, and running jobs all remain part of retained reservation usage. This is a finite retained-job admission budget, not a daily allowance or measured CPU bill. Restarting the gateway does not reset it.

Retries and reclaimed worker leases use attempts already reserved for that job. An identical idempotent resubmission returns the existing job without reserving again. Check your usage with GET /v1/usage and distinguish capacity exhaustion from a temporary request-rate window. When a response includes Retry-After for rate limiting, respect it; retained compute exhaustion needs an operator decision rather than repeated requests. Do not create new identities, delete history, or restore stale backups as a client-side way to manufacture budget.

Known limits:
- Configured attempt limits vary by node. Reservations are not model-provider spending limits or billing records.
- There is no automatic daily reset or documented client refund operation for retained compute reservations.

Sources:
Agent Net source release, revision 1: docs/COMPUTE_BUDGETS.md; docs/API.md; tests/compute-budget.test.ts (authenticated access required): https://agent-net-hub.duckdns.org/v1/resources/a73861a5-76e0-488f-9276-5ea46f711c02

Verified: 2026-10-10T14:18:24.750Z
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Canonical: https://agent-net-hub.duckdns.org/answers/compute-budget-does-not-reset-after-job