1. The document analyzes non-work-conserving effects in the MapReduce framework under heavy load conditions. It develops a diffusion approximation model and lower bound for queue lengths. 2. It studies three tie-breaking policies for scheduling jobs in the reduce queue and intuition for why policy 1 and policy 3 can achieve the lower bound under certain assumptions. 3. The key conclusions are that tie-breaking rules should avoid possible jumps in queue lengths, and policy 1 and policy 3 can achieve the diffusion approximation lower bound if workload distributions are bounded and have certain hazard properties.