Each ten-second queue heartbeat mints a fresh idempotency key and
permanently inserts a row. Published outbox rows and expired/revoked
sessions were never purged either -- the maintenance role performed
lifecycle reconciliation only. At 10,000 queued players heartbeats alone
add roughly 60,000 durable rows per minute, so table and index growth,
vacuum pressure, backup size and recovery time were all unbounded on a
service intended to scale horizontally.
Add retention windows chosen to exceed every retry and recovery horizon
that could still consult the row -- deleting an idempotency key early
would turn a client replay into a second real mutation, so this is a
correctness bound, not just a housekeeping one. Dead-lettered outbox
rows are kept longest, being the record of events never delivered.
Deletes run in bounded SKIP LOCKED batches so a purge never blocks live
traffic, never holds a long transaction, and concurrent maintenance
replicas do not contend. Indexes back each predicate so a pass cannot
degrade into a sequential scan of the table it is bounding. The
maintenance role reports rows purged, the backlog past its window
(deletion lag), and any dead-lettered events.
Also make the migration-rollback test derive its step counts instead of
hardcoding them: adding a migration silently shifted the fixed counts so
the failure surfaced as an unrelated "0006 rollback did not drop
matches.allocation_id".
ApplyInitialConnectPlan wrote a payload of {match_id,state,action},
omitting event, revision, resource_id, occurred_at and player_ids --
every field deliverStateOutboxEvent requires. Delivery rejected the row,
dispatch returned on the first error so it was never acknowledged, and
because reads are ordered oldest-first it was retried ahead of every
later state_changed event on every 100ms poll. One initial-connect
transition therefore blocked lifecycle delivery for all matches, not
just its own.
Two independent fixes, since either alone leaves the system fragile:
Build envelopes through one validating helper (MarshalOutboxEnvelope)
and convert all five writers to it. A writer that omits a required
field now fails its own transaction instead of committing a row that
can only ever poison the queue. The helper takes revision as int64 so
the -1 "nothing matched" sentinel some CTEs return surfaces as an error
rather than wrapping to a huge uint64.
Make dispatch resilient regardless: a delivery failure is now counted
against that row and the batch continues, with the row dead-lettered
after MaxOutboxDeliveryAttempts so a poison event degrades to one lost
notification instead of a stalled queue. Ordering within an aggregate
is still honoured -- later events of a failed match are deferred, so no
client observes that match's newer state before its older state. An ack
failure still stops the batch, being a database rather than a payload
problem.
Initial-connect events now address every participant, not just the
connected ones: a no-show needs to learn their ticket was failed and a
penalty applied.
Add migrations.Rollback(ctx, db, dir, steps): reverses the N most
recently applied migrations, newest first, each in its own committed
transaction under the same advisory lock Apply uses. Down SQL lives in
migrations/down/<version>.sql (a subdirectory, so Apply's *.sql glob
over the main directory is untouched); a missing down file for a
migration being rolled back is a hard error rather than a silent
partial reversal. Wire it into cmd/migrate as --rollback=N.
Add down files for all six existing migrations, each dropping objects
in FK-safe reverse dependency order.
Adversarial review: could not run the new integration test
(TestPostgreSQLMigrationsRollBackAndReapplyCleanly, gated behind
COSMIC_CLASH_POSTGRES_DSN / scripts/run_postgres_integration.sh)
against a real database in this sandbox - Docker Desktop's own
overlayfs ran out of space pulling postgres:17-alpine, unrelated to
this change. Verified instead by hand-tracing every DROP against its
forward migration's FK graph, confirming Apply's directory glob does
not pick up the down/ subdirectory, and a clean go build/vet/test
-tags integration. Worth an explicit real run before this is trusted
in CI.
Josh Creek