The self-learning loop stopped two days ago and reported success the whole
time. 1,444 ledger rows from 2026-08-01 sit unsettled with settle_attempts=0
-- never even attempted -- and every accruing challenger has been starved of
settled sample as a result.
ROOT CAUSE. settleLedger fetched open ids, then REFETCHED the full rows with
.in('id', ids). PostgREST puts filters in the URL, so 500 UUIDs became an
18,499-character request that the fetch layer rejects with "TypeError: fetch
failed". The result was destructured as `const { data: rows } = ...` with NO
error binding, so rows came back null, the loop body never executed, and the
function returned {settled:0, voided:0, unrecoverable:0, pending:0} --
byte-identical to a clean "nothing to settle". Reproduced against prod before
changing anything.
WHY IT HID FOR TWO DAYS. It is volume-triggered. Daily volume ran 20-260 rows
and settled perfectly for weeks; 2026-08-01 was the first day past the 500-row
fetch limit. And the zero-settle ops alarm reads these very return values, so
pending:0 told the watchdog the backlog was empty -- the alarm built to catch
exactly this could not see it.
THE FIX. The refetch existed only to add game_date/settle_attempts/
dclv_computed_at. Selecting them in the first query removes the id list
entirely, so there is no URL to overflow at any volume. A failed fetch now
surfaces its error instead of being reported as an empty backlog.
captureClosing carried the same shape one level down -- .in('id', g.ids) on an
UPDATE, which fails identically once a single line|odds group gets large on a
big slate. Its id filters are now chunked at 100 (~3.7 KB).
Tests: the regression is locked by asserting settlement issues NO id-list
filter at 500 rows, and that a failed fetch is never reported as an empty
backlog -- the two properties that would have caught this. Two existing
suites asserted the old two-query shape and were updated to the real one.
4,159 tests green (332 suites); web build exit 0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01W1sivYNqY2TS5ftykmHBU9
builtbykev
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