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Queue operations runbook

"My queue looks wedged — what do I run?" The commands below are in the order you probably want them. Shipped with v0.19.1 after a production incident where the queue held for 90+ minutes before the operator noticed.

First signal: jobs aren't running

gbrain doctor --json | jq '.checks[] | select(.name == "queue_health")'

queue_health flags two patterns:

  • stalled-forever: active job whose started_at is older than 1h.
  • waiting-depth: any per-name queue deeper than 10 (override via GBRAIN_QUEUE_WAITING_THRESHOLD). Signals a missing maxWaiting.

The worker is alive but wedged (dead pool)

The nastiest stall: the worker process is running (passes ps / kill -0 / container health), but its DB connection died (common behind a transaction pooler) and never came back, so it claims no jobs and finishes nothing. Jobs pile up with 0 active. Liveness checks all pass; nothing crashes.

As of v0.42.22.0 this self-heals — you usually won't have to do anything:

  • The worker exits on its own dead pool. Under a supervisor, the worker's DB-liveness probe runs and self-exits (db_dead) after ~3 minutes; the supervisor respawns it with a fresh pool.
  • The supervisor restarts a worker that stops making progress. If a queue has claimable work, 0 live-lock active jobs, and no completions for 15 minutes while the child is alive, the supervisor restarts it (covers stuck handlers too, not just dead pools). Tune with --wedge-restart-minutes / --wedge-restart-checks on gbrain jobs supervisor (0 disables).

The signal is loud now — check either:

gbrain jobs stats --queue default          # prints a WEDGED QUEUE line
gbrain doctor --json | jq '.checks[] | select(.name == "wedged_queue")'

wedged_queue is a per-queue health error (0 active_healthy + waiting > 0 + stale completions). Manual fix if you ever need it:

gbrain jobs supervisor stop && gbrain jobs supervisor start   # fresh pool
gbrain jobs retry <id>                                        # dead-lettered jobs

Triage commands

# Who's active right now?
gbrain jobs list --status active

# Who's waiting, biggest pile first?
gbrain jobs list --status waiting --limit 50

# What's wrong with a specific job?
gbrain jobs get <id>

Rescue actions (in order of escalation)

# Force-kill a single stuck job:
gbrain jobs cancel <id>

# Clear a specific job entirely (last resort):
gbrain jobs delete <id>

# Health smoke on the mechanism itself:
gbrain jobs smoke --wedge-rescue

What each subcheck means

  • stalled-forever — A worker claimed a job, started executing, and has held the row for over an hour. The wall-clock sweep evicts jobs past 2× timeout_ms; if one's still active, either no timeout_ms was set or the sweep is newly deployed and this job predates it. Cancel it.
  • waiting-depth — Submitters are piling up jobs faster than workers drain them. Set --max-waiting N on the submission or on the programmatic queue.add() call. If you want a taller pile, raise the threshold via GBRAIN_QUEUE_WAITING_THRESHOLD=50 gbrain doctor.

Self-check: is a worker even running?

# If you're running autopilot with --no-worker, check that your external
# worker (systemd / Docker / OpenClaw service-manager) is alive:
gbrain jobs list --status active | head -5

If the list is empty AND your submissions keep piling up, no worker is claiming. Start one:

GBRAIN_ALLOW_SHELL_JOBS=1 gbrain jobs work --concurrency 4

Follow-ups tracked for v0.20+

  • B7 — minion_workers heartbeat table for ground-truth liveness (the --no-worker probe and the dropped queue_health worker-heartbeat subcheck both need this).
  • B3 — gbrain doctor --fix learns to rescue queue wedges.