Opening a screen re-read the same stable facts from the companion every time — the contacts table, self-info, the path-hash mode, the channel-slot probe. Over Bluetooth each is a round-trip, and on a busy node two dominate: get_contacts (~2.4 s with hundreds of contacts) and the channel probe (~2.6 s, it walks every slot index), so navigation stalled for seconds on each screen. Measured on hardware; and asyncio.gather makes it worse, not better — the meshcore BLE UART serializes commands, so concurrent reads collide.
DeviceState (ctx.devstate) reads each fact once and serves it from cache. Contacts use stale-while-revalidate on a 90 s TTL — a read past it returns the cached list instantly and refreshes behind it, never blocking navigation on the slow call. Self-info, path-hash mode, and channel slots are held until an in-app write invalidates them: config apply drops self-info + mode, the channel editor drops channels, a reconnect resets everything. The hot screen openers (nodes, dashboard, chat, trace, TX, map, atlas, time machine, courier, watchtower) now read through the cache. The first screen opened in a session still pays the one read — shared across every screen — and every open after is instant. Transport-agnostic, so serial benefits too; harmless on --mock.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Jean-Pierre MartineauandClaude Opus 4.8
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