The Influx client was built with no timeout, so every query and write fell through to influxdb-client's own 10 s default — invisible to a flow and unchangeable. The param is in seconds like its peers; the client counts in milliseconds, so the call sites convert. The publisher backlog was a module constant, read once at import. It is the depth at which the oldest payload is dropped and the node goes degraded, and a node that bursts wants more than one that trickles, so it moves to Params and is read where the queue is built. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01K1moruzue2kTJd3uVisgNk