writeonce/docs/stories/language-runtime-database/refine/09e-durability-throughput-scale.md

Iteration 9e — durability proof, throughput, and scale under load

Format: product/story-iteration-template. Part of Story — one language, one runtime, one database, one binary.

Inserted 2026-08-15. The measurement backbone. Everything after the functional engine (9/9b) is an optimization, and an optimization without a number is a guess — this iteration is the number. It comes before the optimization iterations (7b GC, 8 shard-actor, 9f io_uring) reopen for performance work, because each of those must be gated by re-running THIS iteration's benchmark and showing the number moved the right way.

No spec exists yet. The forks in Info are genuine decisions.

Goals

• Durability is proven by a restart, not asserted. The employee program (iteration 9b) runs, writes rows, is stopped and restarted, and every acknowledged write is present after replay — the WAL's promise turned into a scripted acceptance on a real program, not just the unit-level crash battery.
• Read and write throughput are measured, published, and defended. A repeatable benchmark drives the engine through the language (not the C API): inserts/sec, point-reads/sec, indexed-query/sec, each with p50/p99 latency, recorded in the tree so a regression is a diff.
• The scale target is a gate, not a slogan. "A million users can read and write" becomes a concrete load: a dataset of ~1M rows across the sample's tables, a mixed read/write workload at a stated concurrency, sustained for a stated duration, with throughput and tail latency inside a stated budget and RSS flat (the log-watcher soak discipline, at database scale).
• The benchmark is the contract every later optimization signs. 7b (GC), 8 (shard-actor threads), and 9f (io_uring) each re-run this and record the before/after — no optimization lands without a measured delta.

Acceptance Criteria

• What to achieve?
  • Given the employee program seeded with data and then stopped,
  • when it is restarted and queried,
  • then every acknowledged row is present with its exact contents, the ids continue past the persisted maximum, and a query that used an index before the restart uses it after (the index was rebuilt on replay).
• What to achieve?
  • Given the benchmark harness driving inserts, point reads, and indexed queries through compiled .wo,
  • when it runs to completion,
  • then it reports ops/sec and p50/p99 for each operation class, writes the numbers to a tracked results file, and fails if any number crosses a recorded regression threshold.
• What to achieve?
  • Given ~1M rows and a mixed read/write workload at the target concurrency held for the target duration,
  • when it runs,
  • then throughput stays above the floor, p99 stays under the ceiling, RSS is flat between a warmed baseline and the end (no growth beyond tolerance), zero descriptors leak, and — for a write-inclusive run under a durable configuration — a kill mid-load followed by replay loses no acknowledged write.
• What to achieve?
  • Given any later optimization iteration (7b, 8, 9f),
  • when it claims a speedup,
  • then this benchmark's before/after numbers are in that iteration's record, and a claim with no measured delta is not accepted.

Out Of Scope

• The optimizations themselves. This iteration MEASURES; 7b/8/9f change. A single-thread RAM-authoritative baseline is a legitimate first number — the point is to have one before anyone tunes.
• Distributed / multi-machine load. Same-machine, one process (or one process per shard once iteration 8 lands). Cross-host is the network layer's concern, much later.
• Micro-optimizing the benchmark harness. It must be honest and repeatable, not itself fast; if the harness is the bottleneck the spec says so and fixes that, but a perfect load generator is not the deliverable.
• A cost-based query planner. Index selection is 9b's; this iteration measures what 9b lowers, it does not make the planner smarter.

Info

Forks the spec must settle:

1. What generates the load, and in what language? The doctrine is "the sample is the test", so the honest generator drives compiled .wo — a benchmark mode in the employee program (or a sibling sample) that loops inserts/reads/queries and times them. The alternative — a C harness calling the engine API directly — measures the engine but skips the compiler's lowering, which is exactly the layer a language-integrated query has to pay for. Leaning: .wo benchmark mode for the headline numbers (the number that matters is end to end), with the C-API microbench kept only to attribute a regression to engine vs lowering.

2. What are the actual budgets? Throughput floors and latency ceilings have to be numbers, and the first run sets them — but the spec must decide whether the gate is absolute (">= N ops/sec on the reference machine") or relative ("no worse than the last recorded run by more than X%"). Absolute gates rot across machines; relative gates need a committed baseline file. Leaning: relative gates against a tracked bench/baseline.json, refreshed deliberately with a commit that says why, plus a loud absolute floor so a catastrophic regression fails even on a slow machine.

3. What does "1M users read and write" concretely mean? A million long-lived idle connections is a different test from a million rows under a churning read/write mix from a bounded connection pool. The sample's shape (departments, employees) suggests rows, not connections, as the scale axis for THIS iteration; the connection-scale test belongs with the shard-actor runtime (iteration 8) and the eventual network layer. Leaning: ~1M rows + a bounded concurrent read/write workload here; connection scale deferred to 8 with a cross-reference.

4. Durable or RAM-only for the throughput headline? fsync-per-commit (the current per-statement durability) will dominate write throughput and is the honest number for a durable workload; RAM-only (no WO_DATA) measures the engine's ceiling. Both matter and mean different things. Leaning: publish both, labeled — durable is the number an operator plans against, and the gap between them is precisely what iteration 9f (io_uring group-commit) exists to close.

Proposed Solution

• Brainstorm the spec, settling the four forks; then a plan whose first task is the harness and the baseline file, because nothing downstream means anything without them.
• Sequence the whole performance arc around this iteration:
  1. 9b lands → employee compiles and runs → 9e restart-persistence and 9e baseline benchmark (single-thread, both durable and RAM-only).
  2. 7b (inferred GC + mark-sweep) → re-run 9e, record the delta (does tracing change the write path's tail latency?).
  3. 8 (shard-actor, thread-per-core) → re-run 9e at the connection/ concurrency scale it unlocks, record the delta.
  4. 9f (io_uring group-commit) → re-run 9e's durable write number, record the delta against the fsync-per-commit baseline — the payoff.
• The benchmark harness and its baseline live under bench/ (or the existing runtime/bench/), and just gets a db-bench recipe kept off the fast path, exactly like log-watcher::soak.