background work

Background Work

You will learn what background work the daemon does outside the four live feed queues, how to see its progress, and how to tell idle from broken.

What is background work

Some daemon work does not belong to the downloader or processing queues. It runs in a separate background-maintenance pool. The admin UI shows this work in the Background Work section of the runtime and queues panel.

Examples:

• Entity refreshes after feed updates — updating country and ASN detail pages after public feed outputs change.
• Entity refreshes after health transitions — updating entity pages when feed health affects published country or ASN facts.
• Startup entity checks and repairs — rebuilding or repairing country and ASN artifacts when startup detects missing or stale entity artifacts.
• Config-reload entity checks — checking country and ASN artifacts again after a successful configuration reload.
• Operator-requested entity work — full or selected country and ASN artifact rebuilds from the admin integrity surfaces.

Feed-output integrity recovery is different: it schedules recheck or reprocess work in the normal feed queues. Entity artifact recovery runs as background work.

What you see

For each active background task:

Field	Meaning
Task name	What is being done.
Trigger	What started this task (startup, feed update, health transition, operator action, config reload).
Current stage	Where in the task lifecycle it is right now.
Started at	When the task began.
Progress	How far along it is, when meaningful.
Worker count	How many background workers are active compared with the configured background-worker limit.

The same section can also show pending coalesced entity work, such as feed updates or health transitions waiting behind an already-running background task.

Shown even when idle

The background-work panel is visible even when no background tasks are running. This lets you distinguish three states:

• Active — tasks are running, you see progress.
• Idle — the panel is visible but empty. Nothing is pending.
• Missing — if the panel were hidden, you could not tell idle from broken.

Coalescing

Repeated entity refresh requests for the same target are coalesced. If the same feed needs an entity refresh while one is already queued or running, the daemon does not create a second serial task for the same feed. Full entity rebuild requests are also coalesced while a rebuild is already pending or running.

Serialization

Entity artifact writes serialize even when the background worker limit is greater than one. Multiple background tasks may be admitted, but country/ASN artifact publication happens one at a time. This prevents two writers from publishing overlapping entity artifacts.

See also

• Live Queues — the four main queue panels
• Runtime Status — overall daemon health and telemetry