Techniques for escalating a real time agent's request that has an address conflict with a best effort agent's request. A best effort request can be allocated in a memory controller cache but can progress slowly in the memory system due to its low priority. Therefore, when a real time request has an address conflict with an older best effort request, the best effort request can be escalated if it is still pending when the real time request is received at the memory controller cache. Escalating the best effort request can include setting the push attribute of the best effort request or sending another request with a push attribute to bypass or push the best effort request.