Files
ocp/lib
9f5bc3264a feat(tui): warm pane pool — single-use pre-booted panes, opt-in via OCP_TUI_POOL_SIZE (−41%) (#158)
* feat(tui): warm pane pool — single-use pre-booted panes, opt-in via OCP_TUI_POOL_SIZE

Backlog item #3 of docs/plans/2026-07-13-tui-latency/README.md. Every TUI request
currently cold-boots a tmux+claude pane. This adds an OPT-IN pool of pre-booted panes.
Recorded as ADR 0008 (docs/adr/0008-tui-warm-pane-pool.md), which extends ADR 0007.

MEASURED (this host, Sonnet 4.6, --effort low, through a real OCP instance; a sample
counts only if HTTP 200 AND the body carries the demanded marker):

  pool off (main code)      n= 6  p50 10.17s  [9164 9499 9760 10572 10774 11281]
  pool on, warm hits        n=12  p50  6.00s  [5286 5289 5520 5584 5621 5969
                                               6040 6098 6280 7846 8036 11053]
  pool on, warm hits (post- n= 6  p50  5.62s  [4729 4753 5236 6004 7548 9548]
    review-fix re-run)

  -> -4.17s / -41%.  12 hits / 1 miss / 0 bootFailures over 13 requests (and 6/1/0 on
  the post-fix re-run). Robust to counting the miss: n=13 p50 -> -40.6%.

The plan doc predicted only -1.0s (the boot). It is ~4.2s because the cold path also
pays ~2.9s INSIDE the first turn beyond claude's own reported turn_duration — post-
input-bar init that an idle pane has already finished. Phase decomposition of the cold
path (n=6 medians): prep 2ms | tmux spawn 27ms | boot->input-ready 1232ms | paste 8ms |
paste-verify 426ms | submit->terminal 8458ms | teardown 8ms = 10162ms total, vs native
turn_duration 5539ms => 4490ms of OCP-side overhead, of which the pool recovers ~1.26s
of boot and ~2.9s of in-claude cold start. (The 426ms paste-verify is one 400ms poll
tick; a real paste lands in ~80ms. Not addressed here — separate item.)

DESIGN
- SINGLE-USE panes. A pooled pane serves exactly ONE turn, then is killed and replaced
  in the background. Each carries its OWN fresh --session-id fixed at boot, so one
  session still holds one exchange. This is what keeps transcript.mjs's
  extractLatestAssistantText correct; its warning about a future warm pool reusing a
  session is answered in-place (comment updated) and left standing for anyone who later
  wants a second turn on a pane — that would be a cross-request TEXT LEAK and needs
  user-line scoping in the transcript reader first.
- Pool keyed by model; --model is fixed at spawn. A miss falls back to the cold path
  with zero behaviour change. The pool warms the most recently requested model, so the
  first request after start (and after a model switch) is always a cold miss.
- REAPER COEXISTENCE (the crux). An idle warm pane IS ours, and the periodic sweep runs
  precisely when we are idle. reapStaleTuiSessions() takes a `spare` set of EXACT live
  session names, and server.mjs DRAINS the pool immediately before the sweep:
    1. a live pooled pane is never reaped — INCLUDING one still BOOTING (see below);
    2. an orphaned pooled pane IS still reaped — membership is by exact name from a live
       in-memory registry, never by name shape, so a pane from a dead process generation
       has nothing claiming it. Omitting `spare` reaps MORE, never less (fail-safe);
    3. kill-server is suppressed while any pane is spared — hence the drain, so the sweep
       still flushes <defunct> claude zombies (the only mechanism that can).
- THE POOL TRACKS ITS IN-FLIGHT BOOT BY NAME, NOT AS A COUNT. bootTuiPane creates the
  tmux session SYNCHRONOUSLY and only then waits up to POOL_BOOT_MS (20s) for the input
  bar, so a pooled session can be LIVE for ~20s before its boot resolves. Tracking boots
  as a count meant the pool could not name that session, which caused two real bugs
  (found in review, reproduced, fixed, and now regression-tested):
    * the reap sweep KILLED the booting pane (it could not be spared), left the pool
      empty with nothing scheduled, and logged the exact tui_pool_boot_failed WARN
      operators are told to alert on — for a completely healthy drain;
    * graceful shutdown ORPHANED a live authenticated idle `claude`: gracefulShutdown
      calls process.exit(0) in the SAME TICK as the drain (TUI panes are tmux children,
      so activeProcesses is empty and the wait-for-children path exits immediately), so
      cleanup deferred to a .then() never ran.
  Fix: the pool mints each pane's identity up front ({sessionId, name}) and holds it in
  _bootingPane. liveNames() includes it; drain() kills it SYNCHRONOUSLY. A generation
  counter distinguishes "cancelled by us" from "genuinely failed", so a drain never
  inflates bootFailures and resume() reliably starts a fresh boot. Deriving the name from
  the session-id also makes `tmux ls` correlate to the transcript file.
- SLOT ACCOUNTING. Refill boots take NO TuiSemaphore slot (those bound real turns and
  would be starved); they cannot leak one either, since they never hold one. Refills are
  SERIALIZED, one boot at a time — live at size=2, two cold boots racing an in-flight
  turn overran the readiness cap and a refill was discarded. A genuinely failed boot does
  not re-kick the chain (backoff; a broken claude must not respawn forever). Background
  boots get a more generous readiness cap (POOL_BOOT_MS = 5x BOOT_MS): BOOT_MS is tight
  because a client is blocked on it, which is not true of a pre-boot.
- BOUNDED COST. A warm pane is a LIVE idle claude process held whether or not a request
  arrives. Peak processes = pool size + OCP_TUI_MAX_CONCURRENT + 1 booting replacement.
  Size clamped to POOL_MAX_SIZE=4; garbage values disable rather than guess. Panes have
  a 10-min TTL and a health check at hand-out (dead/degraded pane => miss, never a hang).
  Missing collaborators throw at CONSTRUCTION, not on a live request (refill() is called
  synchronously from the request path).

DEFAULT OFF (OCP_TUI_POOL_SIZE=0). This is a stable production path and the pool holds
standing processes, so the operator opts in. With the pool off, runTuiTurn takes the
IDENTICAL code path as before (the `pool ? pool.acquire() : null` branch yields null, and
tuiPool is null so no observer is attached and no new log line is emitted) — that is what
establishes the default path is unchanged. A pool-off control run (n=6, p50 9.40s) is
consistent with the 10.17s baseline but had 2/6 samples >12s, so it is corroboration, NOT
proof: n=6 cannot establish "unregressed" on its own. The code-path equivalence can.

BANNER: NO SPAWN ARGUMENT CHANGED. buildTuiCmd is byte-identical to main (verified by
extracting the function body from both revisions and comparing). Live banner captured
from two real POOLED panes anyway: "Sonnet 4.6 with low effort · Claude Max" — the
subscription pool, never "API Usage Billing".

/health: `tui.pool` added (null when off), incl. `cancelled` (boots WE killed — not a
fault; do not alert on it). The tui block is ADR-0007-owned and post-dates ADR 0006's
v3.16.4 grandfather snapshot; the addition is purely additive — every pre-existing key
keeps a byte-identical value. Authorization recorded in ADR 0008.

ALIGNMENT: Class B / ADR 0007 + ADR 0008 (OCP-owned TUI spawn machinery). cli.js does NOT
perform this operation — there is no cli.js citation and none is required: this is not an
Anthropic API surface, it is OCP's own process management around the claude CLI, exactly
as the existing tmux session lifecycle and reaper already are (ALIGNMENT.md Rule 2).

TESTS: 294 passed / 0 failed (was 267). +27 covering acquire/hit/miss, single-use (a pane
is never handed out twice), bounded + serialized refill, TTL + health-check drops, model
retarget, drain/resume, boot-failure backoff, identity linkage, all three reaper
invariants incl. post-drain kill-server restoration, and — the coverage gap that let both
bugs ship — FIVE mid-boot tests: the booting pane is nameable/spareable, the sweep's drain
kills it and resume starts a fresh boot with no bogus WARN, shutdown kills it
synchronously (asserted WITHOUT awaiting, since process.exit runs in the same tick), a
stale settle cannot clear a newer boot's slot, and a model switch cancels an in-flight
boot for the old model.

Live verification (temporary 20s reap interval, reverted): sweep drained both panes ->
reaped -> refilled with NEW panes; a foreign tmux session survived untouched; with no
foreign session kill-server fired and the pool still recovered and served the next
request. Both review bugs reproduced against a PRIVATE tmux server (-L pr3repro, so the
reaper's internal kill-server could not touch the host) before and after the fix.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* fix(tui): kill a cancelled boot's pane when it settles + make async tests actually count

Folds in the independent review's remaining nit — and, in proving the nit's fix, uncovers
two defects in the test suite itself.

## The nit (latent M1b, second costume)

`_cancelBooting` kills BY NAME, but the tmux session only EXISTS once `bootPane` has run —
and `bootPane` is queued on a microtask. So a caller doing `refill()` then `drain()` in the
SAME synchronous block leaves `_cancelBooting` with nothing to kill (a no-op); it bumps the
generation, and the boot microtask then CREATES the session, succeeds, and — under the old
bare `return` on a stale generation — walked away from a LIVE authenticated `claude` that
nothing owns. Reproduced:

  reverted: drain() kills nothing (no session yet) -> boot creates it -> ORPHAN: ['p1']
  fixed   : drain() kills nothing (no session yet) -> boot creates it -> boot kills it -> []

Not reachable from any current call site, so this is defense-in-depth — but ADR 0008 and the
reap-tick comment in server.mjs BOTH explicitly contemplate a boot-time pre-warm, which is
exactly the shape that reaches it. Killing an already-dead session is a harmless no-op, so
the fix is idempotent whichever way the race lands.

## Defect 1 in the suite: async tests were never awaited (44 of them)

Writing the regression guard exposed this. `test()` called `fn()`, got a promise back, and
IMMEDIATELY printed ✓ and incremented `passed` — without awaiting it. For all 44 tests written
as `test("...", async () => {...})`:
  - ✓ meant "did not throw SYNCHRONOUSLY", not "passed";
  - a failed assertion escaped as an unhandled rejection, crashing the process (CI stays red on
    the non-zero exit) but never being COUNTED — so the summary could print "0 failed" and be wrong.
The suite's headline number was therefore not evidence for ANY async test, including this PR's own
M1a/M1b guards. `test()` now settles an async body before counting it, and the summary awaits them.

## Defect 2, exposed the instant defect 1 was fixed: a false guard

`"a boot that resolves AFTER a drain kills its own pane ... no orphan process left behind"` asserted
`killed.length === 1` — i.e. that kill was CALLED once. But `_cancelBooting`'s kill-by-name on a
not-yet-existent session is a NO-OP that still increments that counter. So "kill was called once" and
"a live session is orphaned" were both true at the same time: a test named for the absence of an
orphan was passing while the orphan was present. Now asserts LIVENESS (`live.size === 0`) — the only
honest question.

## Evidence

  fix present : 295 passed, 0 failed, exit 0
  fix reverted: 293 passed, 2 failed  <- BOTH liveness guards fire (the old kill-count guard did not)

Also: `dropped`'s doc comment now lists `cancelled` (a cancelled in-flight boot lands there via _drop).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VqgWJcjxrjjL9L9SkpZyXR

---------

Co-authored-by: dtzp555 <dtzp555@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-13 16:51:12 +10:00
..