Optimizing Multi-Agent Orchestration with Anthropic's Cache TTL

This article discusses the importance of understanding Anthropic's 5-minute cache TTL when building a multi-agent orchestration system. It provides guidance on setting the optimal tick interval to stay within the cache window and minimize costs.

Details

When building a multi-agent orchestration system, the tick interval of the orchestrator is a critical design decision. If the tick interval is greater than 300 seconds (5 minutes), each iteration will pay the full input token cost to re-process the context. If the interval is less than 300 seconds but not close to 0, the system will stay inside the cache window and pay only ~10% of the base input cost. However, if the interval is around 300 seconds, the cache behavior becomes unpredictable. The author recommends setting the tick interval to 270 seconds (4.5 minutes) to reliably stay within the 5-minute cache TTL and minimize costs. This can save $0.50-$1.20 per day for a system making 391K tokens worth of orchestrator calls. The article also warns about a recent change where Anthropic silently reduced the default cache TTL from 1 hour to 5 minutes, and disabling telemetry can also cause the TTL to be 5 minutes regardless of the configured setting.