vsmserver awards vsmagents that misbehave with penalty points, but we never even mention penalty in the TAG. We should probably mention it and explain how it works, and how to reset the penalty counters.
This got improved a bit with bug 3707 as the man page for "tlctl load" includes a brief description of penalty points. It should probably be documented in more places, though.
Note that penalty points are no longer displayed in Web Admin or tlctl as of bug 8542 and bug 8543. They are still mentioned in some log messages however. As long as we mention some sort of foreign concept to our users we need to explain it. It is not necessary that we explain exactly how it works. But saying "penalty points" and not having an explanation anywhere is not good. If we decide to use more generic and common language we could close this bug.
In parallel with the effort to reduce the load balancer complexity done in bug 4429, the penalty system was reworked in bug 8552. It went from adding penalty points to server ratings, to a more predictable system where failing agents are simply put last in the list of suggested agents for session startup. Agents are deprioritized for 5 minutes in this manner, before returning to normal treatment by the load balancer. This is covered in the Clustering TAG chapter and warrants no more in-depth explanation. Closing.
