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. Reachability is computed once per queried origin; cyclic inputs retain independent declaration diagnostics without expanding all event pairs. Unordered declarations retain group membership, with one diagnostic per overlapping group, instead of allocating a pair set and repeating the same error for every pair. Valid partial orders still receive complete pair validation.

Bounded 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 includes this trace fix. 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. The remaining valid-order closure and pair validation can still require quadratic resources. 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).