fix(historian): gate historization capture on the Primary, quarantine a poison tag (#537, #538)

Both defects were found by #491's live gate against a real HistorianGateway and filed rather than
fixed at the time, because each one's fix is a design decision rather than a patch.

#537 — both nodes of a redundant pair captured every value, so the historian received duplicate
live samples for every historized tag (measured: the gateway's write counter advanced twice per
value and halved when one central was stopped).

The recorder now reads a capture gate per value, fed from the new
PrimaryGatePolicy.ShouldRecordHistorizedValues through IHistorizationRoleView — a third verdict on
the same RedundancyRoleView object, registered unconditionally on driver nodes rather than
alongside the alarm section's IRedundancyRoleView (which only exists when that section is enabled;
piggybacking is the #511 registration accident).

Two things are deliberate and easy to get backwards:

  * It gates the CAPTURE, not the drain — the opposite of the alarm sink. That queue is in LocalDb
    and replicates, so the Secondary already holds the Primary's rows. The historization outbox is
    a node-local FasterLog replicating to nobody, so a drain-only gate would leave the standby
    appending forever to a queue no one empties: unbounded disk, then a flood of stale duplicates
    the moment it is promoted. Entries a node already captured are still drained by that node.

  * The peer it stands down for must RECORD THE SAME REFS, not merely hold the same rows — a
    Primary in this node's own per-cluster mesh. A node carrying no cluster-scoped role cannot
    establish that and never stands down: under a fleet-wide election the elected Primary is
    usually running a different cluster's configuration, and deferring to it would end this
    cluster's historization silently, with the drain reporting success on an empty outbox forever.
    That is the scope mismatch that once suspended the alarm drain on every node of the rig.

An unknown role captures, matching the alarm drain — a duplicate sample is recoverable, a hole in
the trend is not.

#538 — the drain writes every per-tag group and then acks all-or-nothing (deliberate: RemoveAsync
truncates THROUGH an id, so partial acking could drop older unwritten entries). One permanently
failing tag therefore pinned the FIFO head while every healthy tag in the batch was re-submitted
to the historian on every pass, indefinitely — duplicate samples and an outbox that never
truncated, observed live at 8.3 MB from a single unprovisionable tag.

The drain now tracks consecutive failures per historian tag and abandons that tag's entries once
it exceeds MaxWriteAttempts (new, default 5), so the head advances. The counter only advances on a
pass where some OTHER tag wrote successfully: that is what separates "this tag is poison" from
"the backend is down". A count-only quarantine looks identical on the poison-tag case and silently
discards the whole backlog during an ordinary gateway restart, turning a duplicate-samples bug
into a lost-history one. Abandonment is also deferred until every failing tag is over budget, so
nothing is discarded on a pass that could not have advanced the head anyway. Each abandonment logs
a Warning naming the tag; the total rides RecorderStatus.AbandonedEntries.

Capacity also gains a non-zero default (500,000 entries) as the disk backstop for the one case the
quarantine deliberately cannot resolve — a historian refusing every write, where retaining is
correct. Set 0 to restore unbounded retention.

Every new test was falsified by reverting the production change it guards, and each one reddens
alone:

  * drop the backend-reachable evidence -> only A_backend_that_fails_every_tag_abandons_nothing
  * never abandon -> only A_permanently_failing_tag_is_abandoned_so_healthy_tags_stop_being_rewritten
  * latch the capture gate at construction -> only The_capture_gate_is_re_read_per_value...
  * treat any Primary as a scope peer -> only the two scope-mismatch cases

Full suite green. (Four OpcUaClient.Browser failures during the run were the opc-plc fixture being
down on the shared Docker host; brought it back up and they pass.)

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015p7wGqy3YpZNCpDzTpGMKo
This commit is contained in:
Joseph Doherty
2026-08-04 12:12:16 -04:00
parent e77ea4aa73
commit e7fbe97759
13 changed files with 996 additions and 52 deletions
@@ -248,8 +248,15 @@ because gating it would also mean a failover window with no capture at all.
## Follow-ups
- **#491 CLOSED** 2026-08-04 — both legs proven.
- **#537** — the recorder has no Primary gate, so both pair nodes write duplicate live values.
- **#538** — one permanently-failing tag re-writes every healthy tag on every drain pass and the
outbox grows unbounded (the all-or-nothing ack above).
- **#537 CLOSED** — the recorder now gates its **capture** (not its drain — the outbox is node-local and
replicates to nobody, unlike the alarm queue) on `PrimaryGatePolicy.ShouldRecordHistorizedValues`, read
per value through `IHistorizationRoleView`. It stands down only for a Primary that records the same
refs — a partner in its own per-cluster mesh — and a node with no cluster-scoped role never stands down.
See `docs/Historian.md` §"Only the recording Primary captures".
- **#538 CLOSED** — the drain now abandons a tag's queued entries after `MaxWriteAttempts` consecutive
failures, counted **only across passes where some other tag wrote successfully**, so a whole-backend
outage still retains everything. The all-or-nothing ack is unchanged. `Capacity` also gained a non-zero
default (500,000) as the disk backstop for the total-outage case. See `docs/Historian.md` §"A poison tag
no longer pins the outbox".
- Still open from before this gate: `EnsureTags` fires only for newly-*added* historized tags
(`2026-06-27-historian-gateway-integration-issues.md` Issue 5) — re-confirmed live here.