A production restart storm measured 90,017ms for a single brain init vs
1,117ms quiet (~80x contention multiplier), traced to performInit() eagerly
awaiting the process-global WASM embedding engine before the VFS root even
existed. Every writer's open() queued on the one throttled model compile
(90-140s on throttled CPUs).
- VirtualFileSystem.doInitializeRoot() no longer embeds '/'. The root is
system-tier plumbing nothing ever searches; when the default WASM engine
is active it now gets an explicit all-zero placeholder vector
(cosineDistance returns max distance for a zero vector, so it never ranks
ahead of real content). deferEmbedding was considered and rejected: its
landing path kicks the embed worker synchronously right after commit,
which would still force the cold compile within milliseconds — just off
the awaited path, not avoided. A registered native 'embeddings' provider
(no cold-start cost, possibly a different dimension) still embeds the
root for real, via the new Brainy.usesDefaultWasmEmbedder() seam.
- performInit()'s eager-embedding step now only STARTS the WASM engine warm
in the background instead of awaiting it inline. embed()/embeddingManager
already serialize concurrent callers on one shared init promise, so the
first real embed() converges correctly either way; a failed warm narrates
loudly instead of surfacing as a silent latency spike or an unhandled
rejection. eagerEmbeddings: false still means no warm at all.
- FileSystemStorage.init() batches its ~8 independent bootstrap mkdirs
(each creates its own full subtree via recursive:true, so none depend on
the others existing) into one Promise.all. The restore-completion step
and initializeCounts() stay strictly sequential — they have real order
dependencies on rootDir and systemDir respectively.
- performInit() now times five phases (storage init / generation-store
open+fold / index init+gate / VFS bootstrap / embedding-warm-started) and
logs one warning with the per-phase breakdown when total open exceeds
2000ms; silent otherwise.
David Snelling
96624f408c