Following up some more on SB00, the 503 issue is still there with DMaaP. There are some side effects on policy from the problems with DMaaP, PAP, and XACML don't back out, and try to fetch messages immediately after (or very shortly after) getting the 503. There is some configuration missing where the "fetchTimeout" is not set for these components, and adopts "-1" value by default. This is causing this behavior. This wouldn't help the situation with DMaaP in terms of rating the requests. In the drools side for example, the fetch timeout defaults to 15 sec. I believe, so after the 503, would wait to try to re-fetch. So, I think there needs to be a change on the endpoint configuration for PAP and XACML to account for a default timeout when not present, or setting it explicitly in the configuration. I'll open a ticket for it.