The reopen said "the pool fills and never returns a source". The 30s census in
the SAME field logs disproves it: free returns to ~227-230 between bursts and
reuses climbs ~20/s all session. free=0 on the failure line is true by
DEFINITION at the instant of a failed acquire -- the third instance of the
counter-sampling trap (live=256-vs-6, then hsparm greps, now this), read off the
alarm line instead of the trend line.
WHAT THE LOGS ACTUALLY SHOW
* The pool cycles; release-on-stop exists and works (the engine steal loop).
* During firefights CONCURRENT demand exceeds 240 and the priority steal loop
services each new sound by killing an old one -- continuously through
combat (failures spread across every decile of every combat session).
* Idle standing demand is ~13 sources. My "each component holds its SourceSet
to entity teardown, ~20-25 per mech" narrative was wrong.
* The raw ACQUIRE FAILED line count (6.8k-19k per log) is NOISE: the steal
loop retries after every failed attempt, so lines accumulate per EVENT and
most events still play via a steal. True drops were never counted.
CHANGES
1. Census now carries steals= and drops= (drops = the steal loop ran dry and
the sound NEVER played) plus a per-class drop histogram
("[audio] dropped by class: {class 1005 x4v: N} ...") -- all ungated, so
the next field logs are decisive instead of suggestive.
2. The ACQUIRE FAILED print is rate-limited to 1/30s and now names the
requesting class + voice count. 19k-line log spam distorted this triage.
3. BT_AUDIO_SOURCES=<n> now raises the POOL cap too (it previously raised the
AL context budget while the pool stayed at 240, making the field
experiment impossible to run).
MEASURED (9 mechs, missile autofire, 150s)
* cap 240: peak 130 sources, 0 fails -- demand tracks SHOOTER count, not mech
count; one shooter cannot saturate. A 6-shooter lobby pins 240.
* cap 48 (BT_AUDIO_SOURCES=64): saturation reproduced -- census
steals=223 drops=455, histogram names the classes.
* Dominant field requester (requested=4) = class 1005 Static3DPatchSource:
world-placed effect sounds, i.e. EXPLOSIONS. 1001 DirectPatchSource x1v
dominates drops at low cap; 1002 Dynamic3DPatchSource x3v present.
CONSEQUENCE FOR THE FIX ORDER: #84's stale-aim double detonation duplicates
exactly the saturating class on observer nodes. Fix#84 FIRST, then re-read the
field census; only if it still saturates does the budget experiment
(BT_AUDIO_SOURCES with frame time measured) become the play.
KB: the wrong night-9 entry in open-questions.md replaced with the corrected
diagnosis; gotcha candidate noted -- an alarm-line counter is not a trend.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
