databasev2 4 part A, task 6. Mostly documentation, plus one real fix the
full battery caught.
THE FIX. The drain held EVERY DB reply until the barrier — including
reads, which stage nothing and have no stake in durability. That parked
readers behind an fsync for no reason: durable.sN.mixread.p99 rose from
~1043us to 4057us. Only a statement that actually staged a record now has
its reply held. Caught by the gate, not by review.
THE TRADE, recorded rather than smoothed over. What remains is inherent: a
barrier blocks the owner shard LONGER (more records per fsync) though LESS
OFTEN, so anything queued behind one waits. Three full runs of the same
build gave durable.sN.mixread.p99 of 1043 / 2318 / 4147us and wmix.p99 of
8758 / 20000us — a 2-4x spread with the box near idle. So part A buys ~3x
write throughput at the cost of a longer, noisier tail on the owner shard,
and that is the strongest argument for part B (submit and keep serving).
- durable.sN.*.p99us tolerance widened to 100% WITH the reason in the
code: a 2-4x-variable tail gated at 50% gates the disk, not the engine.
The floor is the real guard and is not slack — mixread's (4172us) came
within 25us of tripping on the worst run. Baseline refreshed; a fresh
full run then passed 106 checks 0 failures
EXIT STATUS MOVED 3 -> 74 (sysexits EX_IOERR). 3 and 4 are already used by
SAMPLES for their own meanings — db-bench's own `verify` exits 3 on a
checksum mismatch, and it is the gate that exercises durability, so a
durability abort exiting 3 would have been indistinguishable from the
mismatch it should help diagnose. The low range belongs to programs.
Docs:
- story: progress, the payoff measured two ways, the cost side, criteria
split met/outstanding, and a "part B — its premise changed" section:
it was justified by "close the 66x gap", but that gap is two problems
and only the concurrent one was a batching problem
- board: standup entry in the six-question shape; both databasev2 4 rows
rewritten. They had said "close the 66x gap" — recorded as MIS-STATED
rather than quietly renumbered
- 00-wob-format.md and 04-db-binding.md: the normative failure contract
("a failed WAL commit traps WO_T_IO after un-applying the row") was
false; corrected, along with the tick-scoped group commit that never
happened
- database/src/CODE-LOGIC.md: where the barrier runs and why there, why
replies are held, why the inline path is asymmetric, the one failure
rule, and how to measure it
- db-bench README: the wmix mode, the env knobs, and the tmpfs warning
Battery: wovm-test 36 suites 0 fail, woc-test, oop-e2e 119/0,
db-bench 106/0, linkcheck clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
- engine: wo_idx_probe answers single-column equality from the index
hash buckets (idx_hash_key1 reproduces idx_hash bit for bit; verify
compares exactly as the slab walk did, so results identical);
composite indexes keep the walk; both executors wired (local + DB
actor RPC)
- compiler: probe_key_of_where lowers "var.col == key" on an indexed
column to DB_PROBE; all where guards still run (guard stays the
final arbiter); keys = ident/int-literal only; Float/Bytes excluded
(engine raw-eq narrower than VM float-eq)
- measured: reads 1.3k -> 1.3M ops/s, p50 600us -> 1us (~x850);
query x830; mixread 1.3k -> 89k s1, 21 -> ~1.9k sN
- gate policy moved into the driver (tolerance_for: refresh-proof);
latency floors max(4x,100us); quick mode skips poll-bound mix
floors; both tolerance classes proven to bite
- proof: test_table wo_idx_probe suite (RED first), corpus
query-index-probe 105/0, full battery green, TSan clean, two
campaigns pass the refreshed baseline
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- bench/baseline.json: 74 metrics from the first full campaign;
tolerances tuned by a two-run repeatability check (mix* 50%,
read/query 35%, rest 15% — rationale in _config)
- gate bites: --check mode; doctored copy fails, both real runs 74/0
- headline: durable seed 4.5k/s vs ram 297k/s (23's case); reads
O(table) at ~1.5k/s; mixread 1280 vs 21 ops/s single-vs-multi
(the arc's price); msgrate 13.4M vs 2.45M (mutex-inbox number)
- arc delta recorded in story 8; findings in sample README
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- seed/read/query/write/wal/verify/verify-acked + all (one-process
campaign: RAM store dies with the process)
- per-op time.ticks, 1us-bucket histogram percentiles (reservoir
deviation: no element-write/sort in language; better tail anyway)
- Meta expectation rows ride the same WAL verify checks
- finding: hand-built multi<TableClass> SEGVs on drop (elems classed
OWNED, refs are scalar ids) — worked around, recorded
- finding: reads ~1.6k/s p50 595us vs 287k/s inserts — probe walks
all slabs; the number 22 exists to surface
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>