Performance: Unbounded event-log growth — persist file and MemoryStore.events never compacted during operation

[jonbaldie]

Finding — Asymptotic space complexity: O(E), unbounded

Subsystem: Persist — FileStore (src/persist.ts:22–37), MemoryStore (src/persist.ts:96–103), Manager (src/manager.ts:72,99)

Input variable

E = total enqueue+dequeue operations over process lifetime

Current complexity

• Space: O(E), unbounded — never compacted during operation

Cause

Every enqueue() and dequeue() unconditionally calls this.store.saveEvent(...) (src/manager.ts:72,99), regardless of whether persistence is enabled.

• FileStore: saveEvent appends to persist.dat without compaction. The file grows with every operation until the process restarts. Only save() at shutdown or load() at startup compact it.
• MemoryStore (persistence disabled, i.e. --persist flag absent): saveEvent pushes to an in-memory events[] array that is never read and never cleared — a pure memory leak with no benefit.

main.ts:15–17 selects MemoryStore when persistEnabled is false; manager.ts:72,99 calls saveEvent unconditionally; neither MemoryStore.events nor persist.dat is compacted during operation.

Remediation direction

• For MemoryStore with persistence disabled: make saveEvent a no-op.
• For FileStore: periodic snapshot compaction (clear + rewrite current state) or write-ahead log with checkpoints.

Confidence

High — source analysis. No long-running runtime measurement; impact scales with uptime and traffic volume.