rea/experiments/analysis-efficiency/process-trace-validation.md

Process trace validation

A 6,000-event directed cycle previously overflowed the JavaScript stack inside the schema refinement. Cycle detection now uses iterative topological traversal. Cyclic inputs retain independent declaration diagnostics without expanding all event pairs. Unordered declarations retain group membership, with one diagnostic per overlapping or conflicting group, instead of allocating a pair set and repeating the same error for every pair.

A unique topological order proves that every event pair is ordered, allowing rank comparisons without retaining transitive closure. Other acyclic graphs retain only one origin's forward and backward reachability sets at a time. Complete pair validation preserves the missing count and first declaration-order missing pair. General partial orders still require quadratic pair examination and repeated graph traversal; they trade CPU time for bounded retained state.

Initial cycle fix comparison

Flameox ran three randomized paired blocks (seed 917), each limited to 20 seconds and 512 MiB. Node 24.18.0 used a 384-MiB old-space limit on macOS arm64. Each process validated the same 2,500-event acyclic chain four times, then checked the known 6,000-event cycle failure with per-event not-before constraints and one unordered group containing every event. All six executions passed the embedded answer digest and expected rejection checks.

The baseline source is from bb540826d; the candidate is the initial cycle fix in 10935b7b1, which still memoized reachability sets for every queried origin. Both modules had TypeScript annotations removed with Node's identical built-in transform and used the same copied runtime dependencies. This isolates schema validation rather than comparing complete packaged CLI/MCP processes.

Median measurement	Baseline	Candidate
First validation elapsed milliseconds	335.80	177.25
Warm validation elapsed milliseconds	313.36	165.23
First validation CPU milliseconds	366.85	218.39
Warm validation CPU milliseconds	335.32	194.08
Whole-process elapsed milliseconds	1,344.13	787.00
Process CPU milliseconds before final report	1,457.67	941.05
Peak process-family MiB	328.36	395.52

The input is identical: 233,095 JSON bytes, estimated at 77,010 tokens by tokenx 1.3.0. The valid parsed result digest is 28bd99ce83f0da8e45600ef20f114cb52bb26b5f5e6bfc1601ca3e712eaf3147. Actual agent tokens, catalog injection, transport, model reasoning and provider costs were not measured. This is a component measurement, not an end-to-end investigation speed claim.

First validation excludes module import and fixture preparation; warm runs reuse the process but create fresh per-validation graph state. Whole-process elapsed includes startup, imports, all four validations, the cyclic-input check, token estimation and reporting. CPU includes startup through metrics publication; peak RSS covers the complete single-process workload, with no children. Host caches were not flushed. Peak memory increased in this cohort. Its retained valid-order closure still required quadratic memory, prompting the follow-up. Three pairs describe this fixture only.

Preserved Flameox evidence: d6211639446e8b6ec2e82636913eaf471def96673e28f03e9c7f98bec07f8e13; analysis e663b6bd8f5693975542d5b5e2b18437b3c167a0be939bb7386eb68549936231. An earlier cohort lost modules during another checkout build; its three failed executions and timing results are excluded. The successful cohort uses an isolated runtime copy. Source-module SHA-256 values are a7729faa2183b0e493b9ac4fc55f6feaee5b2e5294be13d1b29b57a44b899788 (baseline) and 725409ce84902125941251037a8a214ccc3c1eec577e484c164c361ca580d693 (candidate).

Bounded retention follow-up

Flameox compared 10935b7b1 with the rank/streaming implementation in three randomized paired blocks (seed 624), under the same host, Node, heap, memory and 20-second execution bounds. Each execution validated the chain above four times, then a 1,200-event partial order with 600 unordered two-event layers and all four edges between consecutive layers four times, then the same cyclic failure. All six executions passed both parsed-answer digests and the cycle diagnostic. Runtime dependencies were copied and isolated from concurrent checkout builds.

Median measurement	Memoized closure	Rank/streaming
Chain first elapsed milliseconds	166.11	11.37
Chain warm elapsed milliseconds	154.25	5.32
Chain first CPU milliseconds	210.13	24.38
Chain warm CPU milliseconds	184.76	16.84
Partial order first elapsed milliseconds	49.44	116.54
Partial order warm elapsed milliseconds	50.67	110.29
Partial order first CPU milliseconds	72.47	137.69
Partial order warm CPU milliseconds	70.65	121.77
Capture process elapsed milliseconds	901.24	557.30
Process CPU milliseconds before report	1,101.12	665.03
Peak process-family MiB	391.13	127.72

First samples exclude module import and fixture preparation. Partial-order first samples follow four chain validations, so they are first use of that fixture within an already running process. Warm medians pool the three subsequent samples from each of three processes. CPU and peak RSS cover the combined workload; capture elapsed additionally includes Flameox capture startup and overhead. Host caches were not flushed. The partial-order fixture is slower after this change; these results establish a retention tradeoff, not universal acceleration.

The partial-order input is 165,590 JSON bytes, estimated at 52,783 tokens by tokenx 1.3.0; its parsed-answer SHA-256 is 41d06e593813e497221c36793bf00d5fece7055081895b5f6c123ba6ad9a8227. Chain bytes, token estimate and answer digest remain unchanged. Actual agent tokens, transport, catalog injection, model reasoning and provider costs remain unmeasured. Both cohorts are component measurements, not complete investigations.

Preserved evidence: e29086af99afd8e67cbbd92e43d960ea40f73b4d318ea0cbca60f493575462b8; analysis 086133516f2acf031032d357a3ddb1ac611ce4f12556a24065a2becd567c5f7b. The baseline module SHA-256 is 725409ce84902125941251037a8a214ccc3c1eec577e484c164c361ca580d693; the candidate module SHA-256 is 2109f1096406e9ecac8bbf4f7ae8abb5113404790a9382487285d2831fcddf26.