Two gate/monitor fixes found while clearing gig-up blockers the night before a
gig.
ABSENT IS NOT BROKEN. check-audio-graph hard-FAILED the moment Ardour's Master
was on the internal codec, which made the whole pre-gig gate NO-GO while PLN was
rehearsing on the laptop jack with the UMC in a bag. PLN: "no umc atm playing on
the jack now. we need to be tolerant to various setups." He is right, and the
repo already knows the rule — section 3 of this same script downgrades to warn
when the interface is absent, and rig.py opens with "REPORT ABSENT AS ABSENT".
Section 2 just never got the memo.
Severity now depends on whether the UMC EXISTS. No UMC on the bus: warn, say
plainly that the last hop cannot be proven until the interface is plugged in,
and tell him to re-run at the venue. UMC present and Master still on the codec:
that is the real regression this check was written for — Ardour restores its own
saved ports and does NOT follow the PipeWire default sink, so it will happily
ignore an interface sitting right there. Result: OK (3 warnings) instead of a
NO-GO on a legitimate setup.
A DEEP QUEUE IS NOT A BUFFER, IT IS A DELAY. PLN: "when i move faders up/down
quickly, [it] lags by 500ms+, almost 1s, behind ahah".
Chased this to the wrong end twice, worth recording. First guess was fork+exec
per LED write — measured it: 2.8 ms p50, 8 ms p99, and --bench shows the
coalescer at p99 18 ms with ZERO overrun, so the LED path was never the problem.
Faders have no LEDs at all (row D), so a fader sweep does no LED writes; and the
Pulsar HUD has no MIDI tap, so it cannot lag on MIDI either. Second guess was
aseqdump block-buffering its stdout into a pipe (the exact bug this repo
documents for Python) — disproved with an isolated aseqdump client fed by
aseqsend: median 40 ms inter-arrival at a 25/s send rate, last event landing
BEFORE the last send. It flushes per event.
The real seam is the Bridge's SSE fan-out: `queue.Queue(maxsize=512)`. A fader
sweep is ~400 CC/s, so 512 deep is 1.3 s of backlog — and once it fills it STAYS
full, because drop-oldest holds the buffer AT capacity. Every event the browser
renders is then 512 events stale, permanently. The drop policy was already right;
the DEPTH was the latency. 512 was picked as "generous" and is really a latency
budget nobody priced.
Now 64 (~160 ms at that rate) — jitter absorption rather than a queue. Paired
with the browser-side coalescing from 72937cc7, the consumer drains far faster
than it fills, so it should rarely be reached.
Verified: 79/79 bridge tests, check-audio-graph OK on the jack.
