Records where this stopped so it can be picked up cleanly:
1. c526dd2b7 (media-requests content-visibility) is typechecked but NOT measured - the
only performance claim on this branch not A/B'd before commit. Verify with
measure-board-paint.mts, three repeats; revert if image requests do not fall.
2. The one lever with headroom left is the tRPC router's eager integration imports - a
16.10 MiB subtree of 460 files reached by every API route, which pays twice because
both the ~41 MiB of retained source and the ~38 MiB of V8 compiler zones scale with
how much JavaScript the server compiles. Every allocator and V8-flag avenue is closed.
3. Deferred with prizes attached: ASCII-escaping bundles (9.45 MiB, needs its own PR),
lazy mysql2/pg (21.4 MiB, structurally blocked), beszelSystemStats chart SVG.
4. The proposed set for the clean PR, six changes producing -26% peak anon and -52% at
idle for +18% CPU - with the gRPC patch flagged as hygiene rather than a measured win,
and the +30% board-load figure flagged as not established.
PHASE2-FINDINGS.md had grown past 1,200 lines mixing server memory, client rendering,
methodology and a long list of rejected experiments, which made it unusable as a
reference. Split under docs/perf/:
README.md headline results and the change-by-change ratio table
SERVER-MEMORY.md what the container's RAM is made of, layer by layer
CLIENT-PERFORMANCE.md dashboard cost in Chrome: DOM, fibers, images, paint
REJECTED.md ideas implemented, measured and abandoned, with numbers
METHODOLOGY.md the tools, and the measurement traps that gave wrong answers
PHASE2-FINDINGS.md is now an index so existing links keep working.
METHODOLOGY.md is the part worth keeping: every wrong number in this investigation came
from an instrument rather than the application, and each trap is written down - snapshots
cannot explain peaks, V8 truncates snapshot strings to ~1 KiB, snapshot objects are not
live handles, measuring without a forced GC measures V8's growth, taking a CDP snapshot
added 134 MiB to the process being measured, per-component React attribution silently
returns nothing on a production build, a fixed port can measure a leftover container, and
a server-side change that moves a client-side metric means the workload changed.
Thomas Camlong