A trace subscribed to its tag only after send_trace returned. That send
waits on the companion's MSG_SENT, which the meshcore library correlates
by event type alone — so any other command in flight (a scheduled advert,
a telemetry poll, the courier) can consume ours and leave the send
blocked on its own 15-second default. Every reply that landed inside that
window was dispatched to no listener and dropped, and the walk recorded
as "no reply" though the mesh had answered it. Because the traffic that
steals the acknowledgement is periodic, the condition outlives the trace
that hit it: traces keep failing for as long as it lasts. Subscribe
first, stamp the reply's own arrival so a stalled send inflates no round
trip, and log every trace and every reply heard so a silent walk can be
told apart from a deaf one.
The other half is pacing. run_traces sleeps between its own samples and
never after the last one, so at one trace per candidate — the path
probe's default — it paced nothing at all, and the sweep walked every
candidate back to back. Same hole across the TX optimizer's level
boundaries, and on the trace screen, where aborting a walk and hitting
Enter again transmitted immediately. Repeaters penalize a node that
bursts, and a penalized node's every later trace comes home empty. Pace
between probe candidates and TX levels, and measure the screen's cooldown
from its last transmission rather than only from the previous sample.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Jean-Pierre MartineauandClaude Opus 5
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