docs(desktop): record why G3's max bound cannot be widened

The p95 comment claimed 31x of headroom "lets this run on a loaded CI
runner," and read as if it justified the whole gate. It justifies the
quantile only. A p95 discards its worst samples by construction and so
degrades gracefully under load; a max over 200 samples is one
observation that any single scheduler preemption exceeds. No budget
makes it robust, because that tail belongs to the scheduler.

Measured on one 16-core host at the same commit: pass at load ~6, fail
at ~31 (p95 65535 us, max 164889 us). Sami measured a run where p95 sat
4x inside budget while max alone blew at 38150 us -- a p95-only gate
would have called a 38 ms stall green.

That asymmetry is what makes the ignore-plus-native-release placement
load-bearing rather than tidy, and it is the reason the repair for a
flake here is to fix the host, never to raise the number: a hitch is a
max-event, so widening the max is the one change that removes the only
assert catching the user-visible failure.

Co-authored-by: Dawn (sprout agent) <c6237ef84fa537c78dcee78efd2d4e59f728859c7f194da42ac51ededfa0be05@sprout-oss.stage.blox.sqprod.co>
Signed-off-by: tlongwell-block <109685178+tlongwell-block@users.noreply.github.com>
This commit is contained in:
npub1cc3ha7z055mu0rwwu7806t2wt8mj3pvu0uv5mfp2c50dahaqhczshdalg6
2026-08-01 20:41:43 -04:00
co-authored by Dawn
parent 25fcb5b26d
commit 54cd502009
@@ -22,10 +22,29 @@ use buzz_terminal::{SharedTerminal, Size, Terminal};
/// One frame at 60 Hz. No acquire may exceed this: a single wait this long is
/// a dropped frame regardless of how good the distribution looks.
///
/// Unlike the p95 below, this bound **cannot be protected by headroom**, and
/// that asymmetry is why this test is `#[ignore]`d and run only in release on
/// an idle host. A quantile discards its worst samples by construction, so it
/// degrades gracefully as a machine gets noisy; a maximum over `FRAMES` samples
/// is a single observation, and any one scheduler preemption exceeds it. There
/// is no budget that makes the max arm robust to contention -- the tail it
/// catches belongs to the scheduler, not to this code.
///
/// Measured on one 16-core host at `FRAMES = 200`: at load average ~6 the gate
/// passes; at ~31 it fails with p95 65535 us / max 164889 us. A run at ambient
/// load produced p95 1023 us -- 4x *inside* budget -- while max alone blew at
/// 38150 us.
///
/// So the repair for a flake here is to fix the host, never to raise this
/// number. Raising it is the one change that silently removes the only assert
/// that catches the user-visible failure: a hitch is a max-event, and a
/// p95-only gate passes a run containing a 38 ms stall.
const FRAME_MICROS: u64 = 16_667;
/// p95 budget. Measured at 127 us with F1 on -- 31x of headroom, which is the
/// margin that lets this run on a loaded CI runner without becoming a coin flip.
/// margin that lets *this* arm tolerate a loaded machine without becoming a
/// coin flip. The reasoning covers the quantile only; see `FRAME_MICROS`.
const P95_MICROS: u64 = 4_000;
/// Frames sampled per arm. Counted rather than timed: sample count under a