background work

Background Work

You will learn what background work the daemon does outside the four live 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 its own panel.

Examples:

• Startup repairs — fixing missing or stale artifacts discovered during startup integrity checks.
• Entity refreshes — updating country and ASN detail pages after feed updates or health transitions.
• Health transitions — artifact refreshes triggered when a feed changes health class.
• Config-reload rebuilds — rebuilding artifacts after a successful configuration reload.
• Full entity rebuilds — operator-requested rebuild of all country and ASN artifacts from scratch.

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.

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 background 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. It deduplicates by feed name.

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