1. For use in a distributed processing system, a broker that (i) receives jobs, comprised of one or more tasks, from customer entities and (ii) manages the execution of the jobs by assigning tasks to processing resources, the broker including: a communication management module that minimizes unnecessary network congestion by communicating random wait times to polling customer entities and/or processing resources, thus preventing the customer entities and/or processing resources from again contacting the broker before expiration of the corresponding pseudo-random wait time.