Turns docs/runbooks/deploy-verification.md from prose into 32 executable checks
against the live orchard9-k3sf cluster, and it found real defects on its first
run — including in the runbook it verifies.
WHY PLAYWRIGHT, HONESTLY
tidalDB serves zero HTML (no text/html, no Html(), 10 JSON routes), so this uses
Playwright in three distinct roles rather than pretending there is a UI:
* request fixture as a real HTTP client for DNS/TLS/auth/quorum/404;
* a browser for the only genuine screens in the chain, Grafana;
* a test harness for cluster-plane checks with no HTTP surface, shelling out
to kubectl and attaching the real transcript as evidence.
WHAT IT CAUGHT
* The runbook asserted the operator/data credential split was "not active yet
- requires an image roll". globalSetup read the live image and the live
secret; a probe returned data->403, admin->200. It had been enforcing the
whole time. Section 9 rewritten. (BUG-001)
* docs/ops/grafana-tidaldb.json shipped datasource uid ${DS_PROMETHEUS} - a
Grafana export-for-sharing placeholder with no __inputs block to resolve it.
Under ConfigMap provisioning every panel queried a datasource that did not
exist, so the whole board was blank. The API said "loaded" and I had only
ever checked the API. 41 refs fixed here, 58 across the fleet ConfigMap,
which was also blanking the postgres and redis dashboards. (BUG-007)
* Stat panels used calcs "lastNonNull". Grafana's reducer is "lastNotNull", so
no value was ever computed and Cluster health / Reseed pending / Indexed
vectors rendered as empty boxes. I chased panel width and then panel height
before comparing against a working stat panel elsewhere in the same Grafana.
A spelling error wearing a layout bug's clothes. (BUG-009)
* The namespace variable defaulted to All, so cluster panels silently included
tidaldb-586b544c8-vpkmw from the superseded standalone deployment. Latency
legends read "p50 p50 p50" with no way to tell the nodes apart. Both fixed.
* "5xx ratio" rendered "No data" as large green text - at a glance a healthy
value. And Fleet state gave three fields one shared green threshold, so
reseed_required=1 would have shown GREEN during the exact incident the panel
exists to surface. Split into three panels with per-field mappings.
* tidalctl cluster-status exits 2 on a FULLY CONVERGED cluster, because the
aggregated endpoint reports healthy peers as region=null applied=0
reachable=false. The runbook claimed `cluster-status && deploy` was a safe
gate; that claim came from an exit code masked by a shell pipeline. The gate
can never pass here. Documented, test pins it, engine defect recorded.
(BUG-005)
* The deployed image writes ANSI colour into container logs, which the
collector stores verbatim. Already fixed in logging.rs, not yet rolled;
pinned as a tripwire. (BUG-006)
* The runbook's own backup command sorted ALL backups by timestamp and
selected a restore-canary run: 20 items, one volume, a meaningless pass.
Now filters on the schedule label the freshness alert actually watches.
DEFECTS FOUND BY LOOKING AT THE SCREENS
Six of the first eight captures were slop and were fixed, not promoted:
230-350px of dead space; a verdict that rendered "exit code 2" in green; the
1600x1800 dashboard scaled into 16:9 until illegible (now clipped to the
evidence band using real element bounds); the dream beat whose caption described
a contradiction the image did not show (now a purpose-built capture holding the
committed doc text, the running image, and the live 403/200 side by side); and a
one-frame blink to bare background at every scene boundary, because Remotion
Sequences do not overlap and both scenes sat at opacity 0 on the boundary frame.
TRIPWIRES IN THE HONEST DIRECTION
Three tests assert what is ABSENT - zero tidaldb_http_* families, JSON_LOGS
unset, plain-text logs - and each carries the message "good news, roll the
runbook section from pending to live". The metric-absence test also asserts the
baseline family count, so "absent" cannot pass for "the scrape failed". That is
the drift that made section 9 stale in the first place.
Regression config uses workers:1 and retries:0 deliberately: a live-cluster
check that only passes on the second attempt has told you something true.
Verified: 32 passed (46.8s); 9 demo captures each asserting before photographing;
tsc clean; render 82.05s 1920x1080 h264, 0 empty frames across 10 boundaries;
every promoted image inspected individually and judged perfect; walk-the-render
ledger complete with no fails.
There was no metric anywhere that could answer "how much traffic are we serving"
or "what is our error rate". The engine published a rich DOMAIN surface (search
latency, WAL fsync, quorum timeouts, replication lag) and nothing about HTTP, so
a cluster could serve 401s or 503s indefinitely with every existing gauge looking
healthy. Logs were collected but unusable. There was no way to ask a RUNNING node
anything.
1. HTTP metrics. tidaldb_http_requests_total{route,method,status} plus a
per-route duration histogram, recorded by one layer placed OUTSIDE the auth,
timeout and rate-limit layers so it sees the status actually returned to the
client. Cardinality is the whole design: the route label is axum's MatchedPath
TEMPLATE, not the path, and unmatched requests collapse into one <unmatched>
bucket so a 404 flood cannot mint series. A hard cap folds anything past it
into an overflow bucket while established series keep counting.
The engine owns the /metrics listener but must not learn what a route or a
status code is, so it gained one registration hook
(MetricsState::set_extra_renderer) and tidal-server publishes through it. One
scrape target per node, not two.
2. Structured logs. The previous init was a bare tracing_subscriber::fmt(), which
produced two real defects: ANSI escapes leaked into collected logs, and every
line failed the collector's JSON parse and was stamped level=info — so
`level:error` matched NOTHING and errors were invisible to the log platform
while being collected. JSON_LOGS=1 emits the collector's exact wire format
(ts/level/service/env/msg), span fields are lifted so request_id lands on every
line of a request, and ANSI is off unconditionally in both formats.
Verified against the running binary, which caught a defect no unit test would
have: dependencies logging through the `log` crate arrived with target="log"
and four log.* metadata fields (absolute cargo registry paths, indexed
forever). The real module is now lifted into target and the bridge metadata
pruned.
3. Dashboard. docs/ops/grafana-tidaldb.json, 13 panels, mirrored into the fleet
as a grafana-database-dashboards key. Every metric name was checked against a
live endpoint and all 26 PromQL expressions were executed against the live
TSDB before commit, because a dashboard full of "No data" is worse than none.
Confirmed loaded in Grafana (uid tidaldb-overview, Databases folder).
4. tidalctl live mode. Every other subcommand reads a data dir AT REST, some
requiring a stopped node. `search`, `feed`, `cluster-status` and `watch` take
--url and talk to a running server, with --ca/--insecure because a cluster's
client port is served with the INTERNAL cluster CA. Exit codes follow the crate
contract, so `tidalctl cluster-status && deploy` gates on convergence.
Its first real run immediately found a reporting defect: the aggregated
/cluster/status reported two HEALTHY peers as UNREACHABLE PARTITIONED at 13.3M
lag, having derived lag against an uninitialised applied=0, while every node's
own status reported lag=0, reseed=false and identical frontiers, with
pod-to-pod connectivity open and nothing logged. cluster-status now names that
signature "NO REPORT (aggregated view; query the node directly)" instead of
repeating it as replication lag; a genuine non-zero-applied lag still reports
BEHIND. The underlying gap is documented as open work in
docs/ops/observability.md.
Verified: 2101 + 175 engine/server unit tests, 8 standalone integration (3 new,
including the cardinality proof and the cross-crate metrics seam), 23 tidalctl
(10 new), reseed + catchup + admin-gate e2e green, clippy clean, and both the
metrics and the log format exercised against a real running binary.
The 2026-08-20 livelock ran 21h with no page. TidalDBClusterReseedPending is
`tidaldb_cluster_reseed_required == 1 for 10m`, written for exactly this, but the
defect cleared the marker ~200ms after each latch, so the gauge flapped 1->0
every ~30s and never held 1 for 10m. Add TidalDBClusterReseedFlapping, which
keys off `changes(...[15m]) > 2` instead of a hold duration, so a latch/clear
loop pages even when the gauge reads 0 at both ends of the window and even if a
future clear path reintroduces the spurious clear.
Also add an on-call banner for the operator intervention now in force: the
client Service selector is narrowed to keep tidaldb-0 out of the read path,
because its shard-1 frontier was cross-seeded from shard 2's snapshot artifact
and its reads are untrustworthy even at lag_events: 0. The banner carries the
footgun (the label is on the pods, not the template, so it does not survive pod
recreation) plus repair and revert commands.
`cargo test --workspace` could not run at all: dependency resolution failed with
"aws-types@1.3.16 requires rustc 1.91.1" on the 1.91.0 default toolchain, so the
gate the project documents was dead. Making it run exposed a compile break and
two wrong tests that had been invisible for months. Now green end to end:
143 suites, 3155 tests, exit 0.
Toolchain
- rust-toolchain.toml pins the DEV toolchain to 1.91.1. The published MSRV stays
`rust-version = "1.91"` (the engine builds on 1.91.0); only tidalctl's AWS SDK
chain needs the patch release, and it now declares that itself.
Consumer crates migrated to the current engine API (clean cutover)
- iknowyou-engine: `AgentPolicy` gained five m10 read/profile-override fields;
the literal now spreads `..AgentPolicy::default()` as the engine's own doc
example does, so future fields do not break it again.
- forage-engine: `RetrieveResult` gained p1 `reasons`. The app builds its own
candidate pool, so it now tags what it knows: PreferenceMatch for the
preference-vector blend, SemanticMatch (with the seed item) for
similar-to-saved, ExplorationBudget for pinned discoveries.
- forage-engine: `url_to_item_id` folded into the u32 item universe. The engine
narrows item IDs to a u32 slot in durable per-user state and rejects anything
above u32::MAX rather than alias two items forever, so every add_item with a
64-bit FNV hash failed. 9 of 28 smoke tests were failing on this alone.
- forage-engine: bridge items read the top-2 preference CLUSTERS via
`query_vectors`, not the single centroid from `preference_vectors().get()`.
Since m12 that accessor returns only the strongest cluster, so a tech+jazz user
whose interests split into two clusters looked single-interest and never
bridged. Falls back to top-2 dimensions when a user has one cluster.
Reconcile tests corrected to the shipped contract
- tidal/tests/m8p3_reconcile_production.rs asserted `3 + 5 == 8` for a windowed
count after heal. `take_crdt_snapshot` deliberately keys signal contributions
to ONE canonical contributor (ShardId::SINGLE) because signals are relayed from
a single writer, so per-node attribution double-counted every replicated event
on every reconcile. Merge is therefore LWW on (last_update_ns, score) plus
PN-counter per-node max: nodes converge on the more complete accumulator. The
old expectation was asserting the bug that fix removed.
- Rewrote to assert convergence, count survival (not 0), and no inflation, and
added `repeated_reconcile_of_converged_nodes_does_not_creep` - the regression
guard for the creep itself, which nothing covered.
Pre-commit hook unified
- hooks/pre-commit dropped `-D warnings`: each crate's `[lints]` table is the
source of truth (`clippy::all`/`unwrap_used` deny, `pedantic` warn), and the
flag promoted ~58 deliberate pedantic warnings in integration tests to errors,
making every Rust commit impossible.
- It now lints all five tidal crates instead of path-matching `tidal/`, which
silently skipped tidal-server, tidal-net, tidal-stress, tidalctl and
applications/ - the rot above lived in exactly those crates. Ported the
CODING_GUIDELINES file-length, println, and unsafe-SAFETY checks from the
divergent untracked copy that this replaces.
- CONTRIBUTING.md now documents the real commands and the toolchain/MSRV split.
Fleet recovery and soak
- scripts/restore-fleet.sh: the fail-closed selective restore, promoted out of an
ignored tmp/ directory into the repository. Preflights retained storage,
digest-pinned images, parked state, and aggregate plus per-PV-node scheduler
headroom before the first scale; writes a durable transcript under
tmp/restore-logs/ with structured start/error/rollback/complete events.
- k8s manifests park the standalone store, the RF3 cluster, and the soak monitor
at zero replicas with restore-fleet.sh as the only supported scale-up path.
- soak-eval/soak-watch and the nightly CronJob fail closed on stale or missing
restart evidence instead of silently skipping the restart-aware half of the gate.
- docs/ops/capacity-planning.md corrects the RAM envelope to the real hot-tier
formula and separates analytic totals from the measured process envelope.
The runbooks had drifted to the retired m8/m11p5 design while all m12 production
reality (topology, perf, fixes, DR) sat only in a profiling doc no operator opens.
This promotes that reality into the runbooks and fixes the contradictions.
Contradictions fixed:
- runbooks/cluster.md: the "NEITHER IS QUORUM-ACKED HA YET" status banner was FALSE
(quorum-ack + automatic election have been live since m11p3/p4). Rewritten to
state the deployed reality (single-StatefulSet full-placement RF3, rc7).
- README.md: the cluster section called the HA cluster a "built-in simulated
cluster / multi-region fabric" demo and showed promote-by-region as failover.
Rewritten — real quorum HA, automatic failover, /cluster/promote is a maintenance
verb. Kept the honest caveats (experimental gate, global-signals-only).
Reality promoted into the runbooks:
- Live topology (single STS, ns tidaldb-cluster, 3 voters, full-placement RF3,
gRPC 9601/9602/9603, HTTPS+mTLS :9500), the five shipped fixes, and the real
build+digest-pin procedure (cross-compile -> trixie -> amd64 PLATFORM manifest,
not the index/attestation digest) in cluster.md + kubernetes.md.
- Stale constants: soak ramp 3900 -> 200 rps; cluster grace 60 -> 600s; the
pre-m12 4.5k/s signal-write perf table annotated + the 1536-D read reality added.
- ops/capacity-planning.md: new "Ref-A 3-node fleet — measured capacity" section
(read p99/ceiling, ~250 rps write knee, 1M needs >16GiB nodes, pod resources).
- ops/recovery.md: new cluster-recovery routing section + scoped the quiesce-and-
copy note to standalone (the cluster uses tidalctl + the DR runbook).
New docs:
- runbooks/disaster-recovery.md: the proven S3/R2 backup -> restore -> byte-verify
-> query-proof procedure, full-cluster rebuild, PITR posture (previously
undocumented despite being proven against real S3).
- runbooks/on-call.md: incident response — symptom -> golden signal -> runbook,
severity, escalation, and the open alert-wiring step.
- runbooks/README.md: the runbook index + current production facts.
Open follow-up (infra, not docs): ops/prometheus-alerts.yaml is accurate but
design-reference; promoting it to a live PrometheusRule is the one unwired step.
Switched content_vector to 1536-dim (text-embedding-3-small, thepeach production
width) and ran the realistic peach mix (feed-profile reads + signal writes) on the
m11p6 mTLS cluster.
Result: 1536-dim costs ~nothing on throughput vs 128-dim — knee still ~2,976 rps
(128-dim was 2,981). The write bottleneck is quorum-commit on the 2-worker leader
pool, not vector size. The vector READ path (feed-profile retrieve — the
db.retrieve(profile) path thepeach E2/R8 calls) stays p99 3-11ms through 1500 rps,
never the bottleneck. Memory is the only dim-sensitive resource (567-751 MiB/pod
at 20k items, ~12x 128-dim) — capacity-plan RAM, not throughput.
Recommended sustained target: <=1,000 signal-ingest rps (~1,200 full mix) — 40% of
knee, 2.5x headroom, survives single-node failover, write p99 ~45ms within SLA.
Also: fixed the stale "deployed schema is 128" note in tidal-stress (now reflects
the configurable width). Full writeup: docs/ops/benchmark-1536-peach.md.
Kind-3 term markers in the WAL stream, STREAM-relative vote frontiers,
heartbeat-only divergence detection + quarantine, and fenced promote.
Elections converge in 0.6–1.0s; zero acked-write loss across all kill points.
Closes G5 (leaderless recovery) from the v0.9 wave.
WAL segment format: 8-byte TSEG header (magic + version byte + 3 reserved)
prepended to every new segment. Legacy headerless segments (m0-m11p3) read
as implicit v0 — no migration. Unknown magic/version surfaces as
WalError::SegmentFormatUnknown at open time; foreign files are never
repaired or truncated (fixes the silent data-loss path from the p3 rollout
incident where torn-tail repair zeroed a follower's unreadable segments).
Catch-up transport: FAILED_PRECONDITION ("snapshot required") and stream
errors that skip the shard now arm a timer retry (re-arm-on-skip is the
load-bearing liveness fix — without it a skipped pull never re-fires and
the follower stays permanently behind). Single retry pending per shard;
CatchupRunner owns the Arc'd state shared between the retry tasks and the
transport. Test: tidal-net/tests/catchup_retry.rs covers the retry path.
Stress: k8s stress-job-t2a/t2b yaml + ops/stress-test-p3-t2 runbook.
ack=quorum gates replicated writes on a majority of the replica set durably
holding them: followers push their durably-applied frontier (ReportApplied,
once per apply round, decoupled from ship acks), the leader folds frontier
reports + ship-ack hints + heal resumes into a leadership-scoped CommitIndex
(k-th-largest durable mark), and handlers await it through an async
watch-channel bridge (zero parked threads per waiter). Honest timeouts:
retryable 503 naming the laggards; x-tidal-seq on every cluster write.
Follower blob applies are batched under group-commit fsyncs (22x seeding).
Exit gate: 167/167 leader-SIGKILL kill points, zero acked-write loss.
Seven-dimension review pass (all confirmed findings fixed):
- WAL blob drain now ABORTS on the first write failure instead of reusing
the failed seqno mid-drain (a torn record buried mid-segment would
truncate every later acked record on replay)
- apply_replicated_blobs waits every staged append even after a mid-batch
failure, parses metadata once, and moves records into Arcs shared with
the WAL writer (no deep clone per record on the follower apply path)
- CommitIndex: zero-peer fast path now respects demotion (active checked
under lock before the single-replica return), k-th-largest uses
select_nth over a reused scratch buffer
- await_quorum: re-reads the index once after the deadline fires (no false
503 for a write that committed in the race window), warns when the
commit-watch bridge dies outside shutdown, zero-peer path checks active
- notify_applied report failures: WARN on the first failure of a streak,
INFO on recovery (a silently stalling frontier reads as unexplained
quorum 503s); receiver skips re-notifying unadvanced frontiers
- x-tidal-deduplicated: 1 marks dedup-suppressed signal writes (relayed
through forwards) so durability cursors can tell dedup from no-seqno
- docs: 167/167 kill-point record corrected in CHANGELOG; rolling-upgrade
order (leader first — a pre-m11p3 leader silently downgrades quorum
requests to leader-ack) in CHANGELOG + runbook §8; monitoring note for
report-loss diagnosis on the quorum-timeout alert
Verified: workspace clippy -D warnings (incl. cluster-e2e targets), full
tidaldb/tidal-net/tidal-server/tidalctl suites green, tier-3 multi-process
quorum suite green (8/8 kill points, zero acked loss, partition gate/recover).
m11p1 — decoupled ack/ship path: staged writes (seqno+WAL+relay-push,
microseconds) separate from group-commit fsync; ShipQueue batches+windows
outbound segments; receiver coalesces inbound chunks before applying.
Adds first tidaldb_cluster_* metrics.
m11p2 — leader WAL is now THE replicated log: fsynced batches feed a
bounded WalShipFeed and ship byte-identical to followers; WAL seqnos
survive restarts (relay-reset hazard gone). Item metadata and embeddings
journal kind-1/2 blob records on the same stream as signals; the m8p10
HTTP broadcast is deleted. StreamSegments catch-up is follower-pulled via
server-streaming RPC, triggered on gap detection, follower boot, and
leader heal nudge. Promote carries a stream baseline so peers skip
pre-stream history.
New workspace crate: an open-loop, coordinated-omission-corrected HTTP load
generator + capacity ramp for the standalone and multi-process cluster surfaces,
modeling a thepeach feed session (feed reads + view/like/skip signals + search,
signal-dominated per their user-graph spec). Throttleable target rate, ramp
presets (smoke/quick/peach-100k/max) or rps:secs specs, peach/reads/writes/custom
mixes, leader vs sharded write paths, per-op p50/p90/p99/p999/max latency, a
backpressure-aware status breakdown (429/408/503/4xx/5xx/transport), and a verdict
translated to supported DAU. Runs in-cluster as a k8s Job (tidal-stress/k8s/).
Open-loop scheduler (scheduler.rs) fires at a fixed arrival rate and measures
latency from each request's intended send time, so a server stall inflates the
percentiles a closed-loop test hides; it shed-and-counts rather than blocking when
the in-flight cap is reached. Pure-Rust (tokio + reqwest/rustls), no engine deps.
Findings on the live 3-region k3s cluster (docs/ops/stress-test-thepeach.md):
reads scale to thousands/s at <15ms p99; the replicated /signals path saturates at
~90 signals/s (single-leader funnel + 2-worker write pool + synchronous gRPC ship);
the sharded path sustains 3,669 signals/s at 0 errors and ~27% cluster CPU (≈ the
100k-DAU peak, knee not reached). Overload degrades gracefully (429; 0 pod
restarts). thepeach's planned in-process embedding sidesteps all of it (write ≈82ns).
Splits monolithic cluster.rs into tidal-server/src/cluster/ modules. Adds redeliver-missed
relay, bounded HLC drift, lag tracking, and reconcile idempotence. Five new tier-3 test suites
(chaos, lifecycle, multiproc, region, routes, runbook) all green. Docs, CHANGELOG, and ROADMAP
updated with G4/G5/G6 known gaps.
- Eliminate the tidal/ self-contained doc mirror; docs now have two canonical
homes (root *.md and docs/), with planning/specs/research/reviews moved up
- Remove stale .agents/skills and .ai mirrors; canonicalize skills under .claude/
- Add pre-commit hook + scripts/check-docs.sh doc-guard + scripts/install-hooks.sh
- Implement M0-M10 seven-dimension review findings across engine, net, server,
and tidalctl (durability, replication, query, WAL, storage, CLI hardening)
