The loadtest harness never modelled game.evaluate — the debounced per-tile
play preview a real client fires several times per turn, the hottest gameplay
call. Model it (one evaluate per placed tile + reconsideration re-previews +
draft.save, human-paced; --eval / --eval-recon toggle it).
That realistic load surfaced the real bottleneck: the gateway's backend HTTP
client used the default transport (MaxIdleConnsPerHost=2), so every sync call
to the single backend host churned a fresh TCP connection — ~26500 TIME_WAIT
sockets at 500 players (near the ephemeral-port ceiling), burning ~1.75 gateway
cores while the backend sat near-idle. It was the unfixed root of the residual
transport_error the earlier passes chased on the client side.
Widen the keep-alive pool (backendMaxIdleConns=512, ~2x the observed 225-conn
peak). At 500 players the churn collapses to ~0 and peak gateway CPU drops ~7x
(~1.75 -> ~0.26 cores); postgres (~1.65 cores) becomes the busiest service.
This overturns the earlier "gateway is the binding constraint, scale it
horizontally" sizing — that was sizing around this bug, not a real floor.
Consolidate the loadtest trip reports into one loadtest/REPORT.md (drop the
R2/R7 split) and bake the finding into README / PRERELEASE / ARCHITECTURE /
TESTING.
A single tile that only extended a word perpendicular to the client-declared
direction was rejected: the UI always sent dir=H for one-tile plays (the
dirOverride/Controls toggle was orphaned in the Stage 7 game rework), so placing
"А" above "БАК" to form "АБАК" failed the solver's main-word-length check even
though the word is in the dictionary.
Make the backend infer a play's orientation from the placed tiles and the board
(internal/engine.resolveDirection): two or more tiles by the line they share, a
lone tile by the axis it abuts (longer word wins, horizontal on a tie). Direction
becomes an output, not an input: drop dir from the SubmitPlay/Eval wire requests
and add it to EvalResult. Journal replay keeps trusting the stored "H"/"V"
(SubmitPlayDir) so a rebuilt game matches the one committed.
UI: stop computing/sending direction; the preview now shows the words a move
forms with its total score (game.previewWords); the make-move control is disabled
until the play is confirmed legal; the "your turn" label hides while tiles are
pending. Delete the orphaned Controls.svelte.
Regenerate the FlatBuffers bindings (Go + TS) and update the gateway transcode
and the loadtest edge client to the new contract. Bake the decision into
ARCHITECTURE.md (§5/§9.1), FUNCTIONAL.md (+ _ru) and the backend README.
Each virtual player now builds its own edge.Client (its own h2c connection
carrying both the Subscribe stream and the Execute calls), instead of every
player multiplexing over a single shared http2.Transport. The R2 trip report
traced the ~14% transport_error on game.state at 500 players to that single
shared transport; per-player connections mirror real clients and isolate the
artifact. The assembly burst and the gateway-hammer each get their own client.
playTurn now reports when a game has finished so playerLoop drops it from the
rotation (slices.DeleteFunc); once no active game remains the player idles while
still holding its stream. This stops secondary ops from hammering game_finished
on already-ended games (the other R2 harness finding).
New scrabble/loadtest module (the pre-release stress harness): seeds 1000 guest +
10000 durable accounts with pre-created sessions directly in Postgres (token hash
matches backend/internal/session), drives virtual players through the edge protocol
(real 2-4p games assembled via invitations, mid-ranked legal moves generated locally
by the embedded scrabble-solver — the edge carries no board, so the client replays
history), plus nudge/chat/check-word/draft/profile/stats and a gateway-hammer that
verifies the rate limiter. Prints a trip-report summary (per-op latency percentiles,
result codes, live-event tally). Go unit tests cover the pure pieces; the DAWG-backed
move test runs under BACKEND_DICT_DIR.
Contour: add cAdvisor + postgres_exporter + a 'Scrabble - Resources' Grafana
dashboard and the two Prometheus scrape jobs, for the R2/R7 stress-run resource
baseline.
CI: gate ./loadtest/... (path filter + vet/build/test). Docs: TESTING, ARCHITECTURE,
project CLAUDE repo layout.
Ilia Denisov