We call a dataflow graph consistent if on each arc, in the long run, the same number of particles are consumed as produced [Lee91a]. One source of inconsistency is the sample-rate mismatch that is common to the SDF domain. The DDF domain has more subtle error sources, however, due to the dynamic behavior of DDF stars. In an inconsistent graph, an arc may queue an unbounded number of tokens in the long run. To prevent this, we examine the number of tokens on each arc to detect whether the number is greater than a certain limit (the default is 1024). If we find an arc with too many tokens, we consider it an error and halt the execution. We can modify the limit by setting the target parameter named maxBufferSize. The two new schedulers will interpret a negative number here to be infinite capacity. An inconsistent system will run until your computer runs out of memory.

The value of the maxBufferSize parameter will be the maximum allowed buffer size. Since the source of inconsistency is not unique, isolating the source of the error is usually not possible. We can just point out which arc has a large number of tokens. Of course, if the limit is set too high, some errors will take very long to detect. Note however that there exist perfectly correct DDF systems (which are consistent) that nonetheless cannot execute in bounded memory. It is for this reason that the new schedulers support infinite capacity.