Instruments repaint via the background task pump, which authentically runs
ONLY in the frame's leftover time with a floor of ONE pump per frame; the
gauge renderer is 1 of ~7 round-robin tasks and each turn advances ONE gauge
of ~140 active, with the rate mask advancing once per full sweep. On a busy
MP mission the foreground eats the whole frame budget, the floor becomes the
norm, and the whole instrument stack rotates once in MINUTES at perfect fps:
comms-panel K/D stuck at 0, recharge tickers frozen, while the tallies and
their replication underneath were exactly right. Measured: 4-node bench at
70-90 fps gave the PilotList ~2 Execute turns in six minutes.
Fix, both env-tunable, authentic behavior restorable:
BT_BG_MIN (APPMGR.cpp, default 32, 0=authentic) minimum background
pumps per frame regardless of slack;
BT_GAUGE_BATCH (GAUGREND.cpp, default 32, 1=authentic) gauges advanced per
gauge-renderer turn (a visit is only a rate-mask check
unless the gauge is due).
Verified 4-node self-damage bench: sweeps 0.006/s -> 18-20/s, PilotList ~10
Exec/s, ALL FOUR panels tracked every death live (0->11) within ~1s, bg cost
2-4 ms/frame, respawn ledger clean (40 cycles, 0 swallow / 0 mismatch).
Also: BT_PERF now reports gaugeTurns/sweeps/active alongside bgTasks;
BT_AF_PERIOD now throttles the missile autofire group too (unthrottled spam
trips the documented FailureHeat all-weapons brick, which froze run 1 of the
cross-fire bench).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
