on startup, ram usage peaks at 2200 MB while homing

[ericweiner]

then it drops down to 400.
not sure if you can see that in these logs? Maybe it is caching video frames while homing?
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LVP_Log.zip

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[ericweiner]

Triage / analysis (no fix yet)

Disposition: decide-not-to-fix (benign startup transient)

Root cause: the ~2200 MB peak during homing is a startup warmup working-set that self-frees to ~400 MB. It is not captured in this bundle -- system_metrics samples every 60 s and the run was ~70 s, so the peak fell between samples. The "caching video frames while homing" hypothesis is falsified: the live path holds only a single latest frame (overwritten per grab), and the SDK was discarding frames (OnImagesSkipped), not buffering them.

Proposed fix shape: none -- there is no app-owned buffer to cap. If you want to confirm the peak, a one-off finer metrics interval (~2-5 s) for the first ~90 s would land it in the log.

Cluster: standalone.

Status: analyzed; fix not started; not yet verified on hardware.

[ericweiner]

Instrumentation pushed for bench (per request to figure it out)

The prior analysis could not attribute the ~2200 MB peak (60 s metrics cadence vs ~70 s run; Clock sampling on the contended main thread). Rather than guess again, a throwaway instrument now samples RSS every second for the first ~150 s on an independent daemon thread and dumps tracemalloc top allocators at each high-water step, so the peak is attributed, not just observed.

Branch: diag/issue-692-startup-ram (off 4.0.0-beta). Deploy on Windows, run a cold startup + homing, and capture the log bundle. Throwaway -- deleted once the peak is attributed; any real fix lands separately.