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open-brainy/tests/integration/idle-costs-nothing.test.ts

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perf(flush): an idle brain does no work — no periodic flush without a write REPORTED from the field: a process holding many stores, with no writes for ten minutes, printed "All indexes flushed to disk in 216-601ms" per store every ~35 seconds and burned over a core at idle. Every one of those flushes re-persisted state identical to what was already on disk — the provider flushes, the watermark stamps, the generation counter, the entity-tree stamp — because flush() never asked whether anything had changed. - flush() over a clean brain is now O(1) and silent: a dirty witness is set by every committed write (both commit paths end at noteWriteForPersistence, and the deferred-embed worker lands through the single-op path) and cleared by a flush that runs. A write landing DURING a flush sets it again, so no write's work is ever skipped — it is done by the next flush. Set before the policy check, so a `'manual'` consumer's explicit flush is never a no-op it didn't ask for. - An explicit flush now tells the cadence it happened. It didn't, so the very next write saw "30s since the last flush" and kicked a background flush with nothing to do, and the idle timer fired two seconds later over writes the explicit flush had already persisted. - The graph adjacency index's auto-flush asks before it acts: two O(1) reads of the LSM MemTables, and a tick over a quiet index returns without calling into the trees at all. assessProviderHealth is NOT timer-driven — it is a synchronous O(1) read of a provider's own healthReport(), called on the read gate, so it costs nothing on an idle brain. No change needed there. Pins: tests/integration/idle-costs-nothing.test.ts — 90 idle seconds produce zero flushes, zero provider calls and zero log lines; three explicit flushes over a clean brain call no provider; one write earns exactly one flush.
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/**
* @module tests/integration/idle-costs-nothing
* @description AN IDLE BRAIN DOES NO WORK.
*
perf(idle): the flush-request watch is event-driven; the heartbeat is observability Three idle-burn items from the steady-state audit, and one correction. THE FLUSH-REQUEST WATCH (the strongest of them). It readdir'd the request directory every 500 ms, per brain, for the life of every writer — armed on every non-reader brain whether or not any inspector process existed. In a process holding many stores that is tens of directory reads per second on a completely idle service, plus a stale-request GC on every one of them. It now uses fs.watch, so the arrival itself wakes it and a request is seen SOONER than the poll saw it. Two concessions ride along, both stated in the code: a 30s safety sweep (fs.watch drops events on some network and fuse filesystems, and the GC needs a tick of its own — two orders of magnitude fewer reads than the poll made), and a fall back to the original 500 ms poll, narrated, on a filesystem that cannot watch at all, because an inspector whose request is never seen waits forever. THE WRITER HEARTBEAT goes 10s → 60s. It is observability ONLY — staleness is decided by pid liveness and the fence compares pid + hostname, so no decision anywhere reads the timestamp — and at 10s it was a lock-file write every ten seconds per brain forever, for a value nothing computes with. An operator still sees a heartbeat inside the minute. THE HEALTH NARRATION dedupes by CONTENT, not by the provider's generation counter. That counter bumps on every ledger mutation and rebuild boundary, so a provider bumping it on routine work re-emitted the same unchanged line on every read, while one that never bumped could suppress a line whose reasons had genuinely changed. The generation is still reported; it no longer decides whether the line is worth saying. CORRECTION, and it is against my own earlier claim: the idle-flush commit read a reported idle-CPU observation (many stores, no writes, a flush every ~35s, over a core burned) as caused by the flush path. That does not follow — this engine's cadence is write-driven (every trigger runs through noteWriteForPersistence, which only a committed write calls), so something was CALLING flush() on those brains and the caller is still unidentified. The clean-flush gate makes such a call free; it does not account for it. The code comments and the idle lane now say exactly that. Pins: tests/integration/flush-watcher-event-driven.test.ts — an idle writer makes at most one request-directory read in 8 seconds (the old poll made ~16), and a dropped request is still acked well inside the safety sweep.
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* A flush used to re-persist state identical to what was already on disk
* the provider flushes, the watermark stamps, the generation counter, the
* entity-tree stamp, roughly 28 writes because `flush()` never asked whether
* anything had changed.
*
* The field observation that started this: a production process holding 21
* brains printed "All indexes flushed to disk in 216601ms" per brain every
* ~35 seconds and idled at 1.26 cores, with no writes for ten minutes. This
* engine's cadence is WRITE-DRIVEN, so that observation is NOT explained by
* the cadence and is not claimed to be fixed here what is fixed is that such
* a call now costs nothing. Who was calling flush() remains open.
perf(flush): an idle brain does no work — no periodic flush without a write REPORTED from the field: a process holding many stores, with no writes for ten minutes, printed "All indexes flushed to disk in 216-601ms" per store every ~35 seconds and burned over a core at idle. Every one of those flushes re-persisted state identical to what was already on disk — the provider flushes, the watermark stamps, the generation counter, the entity-tree stamp — because flush() never asked whether anything had changed. - flush() over a clean brain is now O(1) and silent: a dirty witness is set by every committed write (both commit paths end at noteWriteForPersistence, and the deferred-embed worker lands through the single-op path) and cleared by a flush that runs. A write landing DURING a flush sets it again, so no write's work is ever skipped — it is done by the next flush. Set before the policy check, so a `'manual'` consumer's explicit flush is never a no-op it didn't ask for. - An explicit flush now tells the cadence it happened. It didn't, so the very next write saw "30s since the last flush" and kicked a background flush with nothing to do, and the idle timer fired two seconds later over writes the explicit flush had already persisted. - The graph adjacency index's auto-flush asks before it acts: two O(1) reads of the LSM MemTables, and a tick over a quiet index returns without calling into the trees at all. assessProviderHealth is NOT timer-driven — it is a synchronous O(1) read of a provider's own healthReport(), called on the read gate, so it costs nothing on an idle brain. No change needed there. Pins: tests/integration/idle-costs-nothing.test.ts — 90 idle seconds produce zero flushes, zero provider calls and zero log lines; three explicit flushes over a clean brain call no provider; one write earns exactly one flush.
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*
* The laws pinned here:
* (a) the persistence cadence arms only on a write a brain nobody writes
* to flushes zero times, however long it is left open;
* (b) a flush on a clean brain is O(1): no provider is called, nothing is
* written, and nothing is printed;
* (c) one write earns exactly one flush's worth of work, and no more.
*/
import { describe, it, expect, afterEach, vi } from 'vitest'
import { mkdtempSync, rmSync } from 'node:fs'
import { tmpdir } from 'node:os'
import { join } from 'node:path'
import { Brainy } from '../../src/brainy.js'
import { NounType } from '../../src/types/graphTypes.js'
/** Wait for any in-flight background flush, then let the idle timer settle. */
async function drainCadence(brain: Brainy): Promise<void> {
const inner = brain as unknown as { _persistBackgroundFlight: Promise<void> | null }
await new Promise((r) => setTimeout(r, 3_000))
await (inner._persistBackgroundFlight ?? Promise.resolve())
await new Promise((r) => setTimeout(r, 500))
}
/** How long an idle brain is watched. Longer than the 30s flush interval. */
const IDLE_WATCH_MS = 90_000
describe('an idle brain costs nothing', () => {
const dirs: string[] = []
const brains: Brainy[] = []
afterEach(async () => {
for (const b of brains.splice(0)) {
try { await b.close() } catch { /* already closed */ }
}
for (const d of dirs.splice(0)) {
try { rmSync(d, { recursive: true, force: true }) } catch { /* ignore */ }
}
vi.restoreAllMocks()
})
async function openBrain(): Promise<Brainy> {
const dir = mkdtempSync(join(tmpdir(), 'brainy-idle-'))
dirs.push(dir)
const brain = new Brainy({ requireSubtype: false, storage: { type: 'filesystem', path: dir } })
brains.push(brain)
await brain.init()
return brain
}
it('flushes zero times over 90 idle seconds, and prints nothing', async () => {
const brain = await openBrain()
// One write and one flush to reach a clean, settled state — then nothing.
await brain.add({ data: 'the only write this test performs', type: NounType.Concept })
await brain.flush()
const logged: string[] = []
test(idle): capture the stack behind each flush narration — the line alone cannot name its brain The self-diagnosis from the last round worked: the box says this brain's own providers were NOT called, so the flush pairs inside the 90 s window belong to another brain in the same process. It could not say WHICH, and the advice it gave — read the 'stdout | <file> > <test>' prefix — cannot work here: vitest tags a stdout block with the test that is RUNNING, and these lines are captured by this test's own console hook anyway. Teeing them through would only ever print this test's name. The call stack does name the driver, so it is captured beside each line and the first one is reported: `kickBackgroundFlush('idle')` under `armIdleFlushTimer` is some brain's cadence timer, the deferred-embed worker's commit path is a brain still landing vectors, and a bare `flush()` is an explicit caller. Why that distinction settles it. A flush only narrates PAST the dirty gate, and `_dirtySinceLastFlush` is set in exactly three places — `noteWriteForPersistence()` (both commit paths, and the deferred-embed worker lands its vectors through the single-op one), `clear()`, and `repairIndex()`. So a narrating flush is a flush whose brain really did commit a write; "0 ms" is the flush being cheap, not the flush being empty. That reading rules OUT the re-arming-follow-up theory: the queued follow-up is armed only by a concurrent flush() caller, cleared before promotion, and a promoted run over a clean brain returns at the dirty gate without touching a provider or printing a line. Context the message now carries: the suite runs every file in ONE process, and a create-versus-close scan puts 67 test files above the line — more brains made than closed. This assertion is downstream of that, and the next red arrives with the stack that names which one.
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// The STACK behind each narration, kept beside the line it belongs to.
// vitest tags a stdout block with the test that is RUNNING, not the brain
// that wrote it, so teeing these lines through would only ever name this
// test. The call stack does name the driver: `kickBackgroundFlush('idle')`
// under `armIdleFlushTimer` is a cadence flush on some brain, the deferred-
// embed worker's commit path is a brain still landing vectors, and a bare
// `flush()` is an explicit caller. That distinction is the whole question.
const stacks: string[] = []
perf(flush): an idle brain does no work — no periodic flush without a write REPORTED from the field: a process holding many stores, with no writes for ten minutes, printed "All indexes flushed to disk in 216-601ms" per store every ~35 seconds and burned over a core at idle. Every one of those flushes re-persisted state identical to what was already on disk — the provider flushes, the watermark stamps, the generation counter, the entity-tree stamp — because flush() never asked whether anything had changed. - flush() over a clean brain is now O(1) and silent: a dirty witness is set by every committed write (both commit paths end at noteWriteForPersistence, and the deferred-embed worker lands through the single-op path) and cleared by a flush that runs. A write landing DURING a flush sets it again, so no write's work is ever skipped — it is done by the next flush. Set before the policy check, so a `'manual'` consumer's explicit flush is never a no-op it didn't ask for. - An explicit flush now tells the cadence it happened. It didn't, so the very next write saw "30s since the last flush" and kicked a background flush with nothing to do, and the idle timer fired two seconds later over writes the explicit flush had already persisted. - The graph adjacency index's auto-flush asks before it acts: two O(1) reads of the LSM MemTables, and a tick over a quiet index returns without calling into the trees at all. assessProviderHealth is NOT timer-driven — it is a synchronous O(1) read of a provider's own healthReport(), called on the read gate, so it costs nothing on an idle brain. No change needed there. Pins: tests/integration/idle-costs-nothing.test.ts — 90 idle seconds produce zero flushes, zero provider calls and zero log lines; three explicit flushes over a clean brain call no provider; one write earns exactly one flush.
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const origLog = console.log
test(idle): capture the stack behind each flush narration — the line alone cannot name its brain The self-diagnosis from the last round worked: the box says this brain's own providers were NOT called, so the flush pairs inside the 90 s window belong to another brain in the same process. It could not say WHICH, and the advice it gave — read the 'stdout | <file> > <test>' prefix — cannot work here: vitest tags a stdout block with the test that is RUNNING, and these lines are captured by this test's own console hook anyway. Teeing them through would only ever print this test's name. The call stack does name the driver, so it is captured beside each line and the first one is reported: `kickBackgroundFlush('idle')` under `armIdleFlushTimer` is some brain's cadence timer, the deferred-embed worker's commit path is a brain still landing vectors, and a bare `flush()` is an explicit caller. Why that distinction settles it. A flush only narrates PAST the dirty gate, and `_dirtySinceLastFlush` is set in exactly three places — `noteWriteForPersistence()` (both commit paths, and the deferred-embed worker lands its vectors through the single-op one), `clear()`, and `repairIndex()`. So a narrating flush is a flush whose brain really did commit a write; "0 ms" is the flush being cheap, not the flush being empty. That reading rules OUT the re-arming-follow-up theory: the queued follow-up is armed only by a concurrent flush() caller, cleared before promotion, and a promoted run over a clean brain returns at the dirty gate without touching a provider or printing a line. Context the message now carries: the suite runs every file in ONE process, and a create-versus-close scan puts 67 test files above the line — more brains made than closed. This assertion is downstream of that, and the next red arrives with the stack that names which one.
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console.log = ((...a: unknown[]) => {
const line = a.map(String).join(' ')
logged.push(line)
if (/All indexes flushed to disk|Flushing Brainy indexes/.test(line)) {
stacks.push(new Error('flush narration').stack ?? '(no stack)')
}
}) as typeof console.log
perf(flush): an idle brain does no work — no periodic flush without a write REPORTED from the field: a process holding many stores, with no writes for ten minutes, printed "All indexes flushed to disk in 216-601ms" per store every ~35 seconds and burned over a core at idle. Every one of those flushes re-persisted state identical to what was already on disk — the provider flushes, the watermark stamps, the generation counter, the entity-tree stamp — because flush() never asked whether anything had changed. - flush() over a clean brain is now O(1) and silent: a dirty witness is set by every committed write (both commit paths end at noteWriteForPersistence, and the deferred-embed worker lands through the single-op path) and cleared by a flush that runs. A write landing DURING a flush sets it again, so no write's work is ever skipped — it is done by the next flush. Set before the policy check, so a `'manual'` consumer's explicit flush is never a no-op it didn't ask for. - An explicit flush now tells the cadence it happened. It didn't, so the very next write saw "30s since the last flush" and kicked a background flush with nothing to do, and the idle timer fired two seconds later over writes the explicit flush had already persisted. - The graph adjacency index's auto-flush asks before it acts: two O(1) reads of the LSM MemTables, and a tick over a quiet index returns without calling into the trees at all. assessProviderHealth is NOT timer-driven — it is a synchronous O(1) read of a provider's own healthReport(), called on the read gate, so it costs nothing on an idle brain. No change needed there. Pins: tests/integration/idle-costs-nothing.test.ts — 90 idle seconds produce zero flushes, zero provider calls and zero log lines; three explicit flushes over a clean brain call no provider; one write earns exactly one flush.
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// Watch the providers directly: a flush that runs calls all of them.
const storage = (brain as unknown as { storage: { flushCounts: () => Promise<void> } }).storage
const metadataIndex = (brain as unknown as { metadataIndex: { flush: () => Promise<void> } }).metadataIndex
const graphIndex = (brain as unknown as { graphIndex: { flush: () => Promise<void> } }).graphIndex
const countsSpy = vi.spyOn(storage, 'flushCounts')
const metadataSpy = vi.spyOn(metadataIndex, 'flush')
const graphSpy = vi.spyOn(graphIndex, 'flush')
try {
await new Promise((r) => setTimeout(r, IDLE_WATCH_MS))
} finally {
console.log = origLog
}
// (a) + (b): nothing ran, nothing was said.
//
// THE SPIES COME FIRST, AND THEY ARE THE ATTRIBUTABLE HALF. They are bound
// to THIS brain's providers, so they answer "did this brain flush?" and
// nothing else. The console filters below cannot: the gate config runs the
// whole suite in ONE process (`pool: 'forks'`, `singleFork: true`), so
// `console.log` carries the narration of every brain alive in that
// process — including one a previous file opened and never closed, whose
// unref'd cadence timer is still doing honest work. A neighbour narrating
// is a REAL finding about suite hygiene, but it is not this brain failing
// its own law, and the two must not be reported as the same thing.
//
// So: spies first (whose failure means the engine broke the law), console
// second (whose failure means SOMETHING in the process narrated), and the
// console assertion carries the captured lines in its message. vitest's
// stdout blocks are prefixed `stdout | <file> > <test>`, so those lines
// plus the surrounding gate log name the brain that printed them.
perf(flush): an idle brain does no work — no periodic flush without a write REPORTED from the field: a process holding many stores, with no writes for ten minutes, printed "All indexes flushed to disk in 216-601ms" per store every ~35 seconds and burned over a core at idle. Every one of those flushes re-persisted state identical to what was already on disk — the provider flushes, the watermark stamps, the generation counter, the entity-tree stamp — because flush() never asked whether anything had changed. - flush() over a clean brain is now O(1) and silent: a dirty witness is set by every committed write (both commit paths end at noteWriteForPersistence, and the deferred-embed worker lands through the single-op path) and cleared by a flush that runs. A write landing DURING a flush sets it again, so no write's work is ever skipped — it is done by the next flush. Set before the policy check, so a `'manual'` consumer's explicit flush is never a no-op it didn't ask for. - An explicit flush now tells the cadence it happened. It didn't, so the very next write saw "30s since the last flush" and kicked a background flush with nothing to do, and the idle timer fired two seconds later over writes the explicit flush had already persisted. - The graph adjacency index's auto-flush asks before it acts: two O(1) reads of the LSM MemTables, and a tick over a quiet index returns without calling into the trees at all. assessProviderHealth is NOT timer-driven — it is a synchronous O(1) read of a provider's own healthReport(), called on the read gate, so it costs nothing on an idle brain. No change needed there. Pins: tests/integration/idle-costs-nothing.test.ts — 90 idle seconds produce zero flushes, zero provider calls and zero log lines; three explicit flushes over a clean brain call no provider; one write earns exactly one flush.
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expect(countsSpy).not.toHaveBeenCalled()
expect(metadataSpy).not.toHaveBeenCalled()
expect(graphSpy).not.toHaveBeenCalled()
const flushChatter = logged.filter(
(l) => /All indexes flushed to disk/.test(l) || /Flushing Brainy indexes/.test(l)
)
expect(
flushChatter,
test(idle): capture the stack behind each flush narration — the line alone cannot name its brain The self-diagnosis from the last round worked: the box says this brain's own providers were NOT called, so the flush pairs inside the 90 s window belong to another brain in the same process. It could not say WHICH, and the advice it gave — read the 'stdout | <file> > <test>' prefix — cannot work here: vitest tags a stdout block with the test that is RUNNING, and these lines are captured by this test's own console hook anyway. Teeing them through would only ever print this test's name. The call stack does name the driver, so it is captured beside each line and the first one is reported: `kickBackgroundFlush('idle')` under `armIdleFlushTimer` is some brain's cadence timer, the deferred-embed worker's commit path is a brain still landing vectors, and a bare `flush()` is an explicit caller. Why that distinction settles it. A flush only narrates PAST the dirty gate, and `_dirtySinceLastFlush` is set in exactly three places — `noteWriteForPersistence()` (both commit paths, and the deferred-embed worker lands its vectors through the single-op one), `clear()`, and `repairIndex()`. So a narrating flush is a flush whose brain really did commit a write; "0 ms" is the flush being cheap, not the flush being empty. That reading rules OUT the re-arming-follow-up theory: the queued follow-up is armed only by a concurrent flush() caller, cleared before promotion, and a promoted run over a clean brain returns at the dirty gate without touching a provider or printing a line. Context the message now carries: the suite runs every file in ONE process, and a create-versus-close scan puts 67 test files above the line — more brains made than closed. This assertion is downstream of that, and the next red arrives with the stack that names which one.
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`${flushChatter.length} flush line(s) narrated during the ${IDLE_WATCH_MS}ms idle ` +
`window. This brain's own providers were NOT called (asserted above), so another ` +
`brain alive in this process printed them — the suite runs every file in ONE ` +
`process and 67 test files create more brains than they close.\n` +
`${flushChatter.join('\n')}\n\n` +
`The stack behind the first one names the driver:\n${stacks[0] ?? '(none captured)'}`
).toEqual([])
perf(flush): an idle brain does no work — no periodic flush without a write REPORTED from the field: a process holding many stores, with no writes for ten minutes, printed "All indexes flushed to disk in 216-601ms" per store every ~35 seconds and burned over a core at idle. Every one of those flushes re-persisted state identical to what was already on disk — the provider flushes, the watermark stamps, the generation counter, the entity-tree stamp — because flush() never asked whether anything had changed. - flush() over a clean brain is now O(1) and silent: a dirty witness is set by every committed write (both commit paths end at noteWriteForPersistence, and the deferred-embed worker lands through the single-op path) and cleared by a flush that runs. A write landing DURING a flush sets it again, so no write's work is ever skipped — it is done by the next flush. Set before the policy check, so a `'manual'` consumer's explicit flush is never a no-op it didn't ask for. - An explicit flush now tells the cadence it happened. It didn't, so the very next write saw "30s since the last flush" and kicked a background flush with nothing to do, and the idle timer fired two seconds later over writes the explicit flush had already persisted. - The graph adjacency index's auto-flush asks before it acts: two O(1) reads of the LSM MemTables, and a tick over a quiet index returns without calling into the trees at all. assessProviderHealth is NOT timer-driven — it is a synchronous O(1) read of a provider's own healthReport(), called on the read gate, so it costs nothing on an idle brain. No change needed there. Pins: tests/integration/idle-costs-nothing.test.ts — 90 idle seconds produce zero flushes, zero provider calls and zero log lines; three explicit flushes over a clean brain call no provider; one write earns exactly one flush.
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}, 180_000)
it('an explicit flush over a clean brain calls no provider and prints nothing', async () => {
const brain = await openBrain()
await brain.add({ data: 'one write', type: NounType.Concept })
await brain.flush() // this one does the work
const storage = (brain as unknown as { storage: { flushCounts: () => Promise<void> } }).storage
const metadataIndex = (brain as unknown as { metadataIndex: { flush: () => Promise<void> } }).metadataIndex
const countsSpy = vi.spyOn(storage, 'flushCounts')
const metadataSpy = vi.spyOn(metadataIndex, 'flush')
const logged: string[] = []
const origLog = console.log
console.log = ((...a: unknown[]) => { logged.push(a.map(String).join(' ')) }) as typeof console.log
try {
await brain.flush() // ...and this one has nothing to do
await brain.flush()
await brain.flush()
} finally {
console.log = origLog
}
expect(countsSpy).not.toHaveBeenCalled()
expect(metadataSpy).not.toHaveBeenCalled()
expect(logged.filter((l) => /All indexes flushed to disk/.test(l))).toEqual([])
}, 120_000)
it('one write earns exactly one flush', async () => {
const brain = await openBrain()
await brain.add({ data: 'first', type: NounType.Concept })
await brain.flush()
// Settle: the first write also kicked a BACKGROUND flush, which is not
// awaited by design. Drain it before counting, or its provider calls land
// inside this test's window and are attributed to the write below.
await drainCadence(brain)
// Count the flushes that actually RAN. (Provider spies cannot answer this:
// the storage adapter's own count ledger is write-through, so a write calls
// flushCounts() on its own account, with no flush involved.)
const logged: string[] = []
const origLog = console.log
console.log = ((...a: unknown[]) => { logged.push(a.map(String).join(' ')) }) as typeof console.log
const ran = () => logged.filter((l) => /All indexes flushed to disk/.test(l)).length
try {
await brain.add({ data: 'second — this is the cause', type: NounType.Concept })
await brain.flush()
expect(ran()).toBe(1)
// No further cause, no further work.
await brain.flush()
await brain.flush()
expect(ran()).toBe(1)
} finally {
console.log = origLog
}
}, 120_000)
})