Meaning of "to be" in this sentence

Question

upstream binaries can starve downstream binaries by allocating all requests to be in experiments prior to the requests being sent downstream

I cannot understand the meaning of the phrase "to be" here, is that a mistake?

Answer 1

You should consider the word "in" to have a better understanding, therefore the sentence would be "to be in" that is a very common idiom to refer to something that is inside somewhere.

I think this link will help you https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/be+in

Answer 2

it's "allocate to {...}", not "allocate to be in {...}"

Having read the source paper, it's clearly a misuse of "to allocate":

to allocate (v): to give something to someone as their share of a total amount

However, you cannot "allocate" a thing "to be" something.

• correct: I allocate 200 Gigabytes of storage to this program

but not

• incorrect: I allocate this program to be on removable storage.

They've used this second, incorrect form.

To summarise the context: They have a web service where requests are processed by a chain of what they (wrongly) call "binaries". They then discuss the idea of diverting some incoming requests so that they pass along a different path where experiments are performed on them.

The quoted sentence is basically saying that if an earlier ("upstream") link in the chain diverts all requests into the "experiments performed" path, then later ("downstream") stages will be starved of requests.

Slightly re-written (the bits in italics) for clarity, and with the correct usage of "allocate" (in boldface):

• upstream binaries can starve downstream binaries by allocating all incoming requests to the experiments path prior to those requests being sent downstream