Notably on this point, resource contention on e.g. a Kubernetes cluster can cause these kinds of things to fail spuriously. Sleeps have their uses, but assuming that work is done while you’re sleeping is rarely a good idea, because when it rains it will pour.

I believe _Algernon_ was making a joke about how you could take this problem and make the code even worse, not proposing a solution to the problem.

It's also not even a problem with slow computers or insufficient memory, __init__ does I/O here, it connects to ZeroMQ, so it could have arbitrary latency in various circumstances exceeding the 100 milliseconds that we would be sleeping for. So the joke is, this fixes the problem in your test environment where everything is squeaky clean and you know that ZeroMQ is reachable, and now you have bugs in prod still.