32997e2e1b
## Summary
A cold client in 280 channels can issue 280 separate membership reads,
each checking out a database connection. Cache the user's complete
active-membership set per community so those channel checks share one
read.
Keep the existing membership rules and 10-second freshness bound,
measured from connection checkout. Moka now accounts for snapshot size
with a 64 MiB weighted budget per relay. Each snapshot holds at most
16,384 UUIDs. The database pool controls query concurrency; there is no
separate 16-load limiter. Channel discovery keeps its separate filtering
rules. No schema change or migration.
### Request flow
1. Look up the community/user entry in Moka. A fresh complete snapshot
answers channel checks by binary search.
2. A fresh `PointChecks` marker sends each check to the database; it
stores no permission decision.
3. On a miss, create a lightweight, weighted loading entry. Requests for
that user share its lock.
4. Recheck after acquiring the lock. If waiting for that user’s lock
times out, use a point check.
5. Fetch at most 16,385 membership IDs. Above 16,384, retain a
`PointChecks` marker instead of a partial list.
6. Otherwise, sort the complete list into a compact immutable UUID
array.
7. Replace the loading entry through Moka. Its weigher now includes the
completed payload plus estimated bookkeeping.
8. Let Moka manage admission, eviction, and 10-second expiry. Membership
changes remove the relevant user or community entries.
Publication and invalidation share a short synchronous lock. A loader
publishes only while its original loading lock still identifies the
current entry. An old load can finish its original request, but cannot
repopulate an invalidated entry. Database failures propagate;
cancellation releases the user lock. Both database-query futures
allocate only when used, which keeps nested handler futures small. Cache
hits allocate neither query.
The budget covers estimated retained cache weight. Moka enforces it on a
best-effort basis; query buffers and snapshots held by active requests
can add memory. This is not a strict process-memory ceiling. Empty
entries and fallback markers have nonzero weight. There is no separate
memory-reservation or eviction implementation.
### Operational notes
- A newly granted membership can be absent from another relay's cached
snapshot until the Redis invalidation arrives, or until the 10-second
freshness bound expires if it is lost. Cached write checks can briefly
deny access; explicit channel subscriptions already confirm missing
membership against the database.
- `buzz_membership_cache_hits_total` counts channel checks served from a
fresh snapshot. `buzz_membership_cache_misses_total` counts bounded
full-set load attempts. Timeouts now use point checks, recorded by
`buzz_membership_cache_fallbacks_total{reason="wait_timeout"}`. The
other fallback reason is `oversize`; the `load_limit` path has been
removed. Before/after hit ratios are not directly comparable.
- Keep `channel_id` in membership invalidation messages for
compatibility with older relay instances during rolling deployments,
even though the new local cache invalidates by user.
### Related issue
Follow-up to #9012.
### Testing
**Current head: `a79a40cc5a6e4c7c611ed1b6bcbdd8b8c0490ef2`, including
main `f82944e3180e28502f5ea599ac9973aa6398ddb3`.** Commit `393b32583`
fixes the large-membership test fixture by refreshing planner statistics
after bulk seeding. Before that fix, the boundary test failed locally
and was the sole PostgreSQL test failure in GitHub CI (1,409/1,410
passed); the repaired test passes in 3.54 seconds including setup and
all checks. An isolated copy of the production schema/query at 16,384
memberships selected a quadratic join without statistics and a hash join
after `ANALYZE`; the latter executed in 10.86 ms. The cap and freshness
rules are unchanged.
At this exact head, the full regular buzz-db/buzz-relay suite passed
1,963/1,963 and the full PostgreSQL suite passed 1,310/1,310. This
includes both previously failing Git-auth cases and the repaired
membership boundary test (2.302 seconds including setup and checks).
Rebuilt signed live checks also passed. Full local `just ci` passed
(exit 0). GitHub CI is green: 79 successful checks and 31 skipped, with
none pending or failed at verification. The [verified matched A/B at
this
head](https://github.com/block/buzz/pull/9060#issuecomment-6673813172)
against main `f82944e31` is complete: four 6,600-client arms in both
orders show 90.98–91.24% fewer membership-cache queries and 73.76–74.23%
fewer authorization checkouts. Auth error rates improved in both orders;
auth p99 and overall operation errors were mixed. Average relay RSS
increased 1.6–4.3%, with flat to slightly lower sampled peaks;
PostgreSQL average PSS decreased 1.7–5.2%, with mixed peaks. The
16,384-row production query executed in 24.953 ms after fixture ANALYZE.
Signed pool-4 and 4,097/16,384/16,385-membership probes passed. See the
report for raw counts, memory, provenance and limitations. The
[completed A/B at the earlier `6f0358875`
head](https://github.com/block/buzz/pull/9060#issuecomment-6672419096)
is reported separately; it does not establish current-head performance.
Users above 16,384 memberships still use uncached authoritative point
checks. The higher cap reduces how many users hit that fallback; it does
not eliminate the cost. Each maximum-size list contains 256 KiB of UUIDs
plus overhead within the unchanged 64 MiB estimated cache budget.
Temporary allocations and retained readers can add memory outside that
budget.
Agent-run signed WebSocket test at
`a79a40cc5a6e4c7c611ed1b6bcbdd8b8c0490ef2`, using the rebuilt relay and
an isolated database: non-members cannot post; grants allow both private
channels; removal blocks writes and delivery from A while B continues;
re-add and resubscription restore A. Delivery checks completed in 1.776
s after removal and 0.466 s after re-add. A user grown above 5,000
memberships used snapshots with no oversize fallback. After growing
beyond 16,384, authoritative point checks still enforced removal and
re-add; four oversize fallbacks were recorded. The relay stopped and all
three test ports closed. Binary SHA-256:
`5b69a5aed07e9beef6bd6d2c5661c07fbdf1901dedb1729d27ab5e86a6b8d6a3`.
Build this head with `cargo build -p buzz-relay --bin buzz-relay` and
start an isolated local relay as described in
[TESTING.md](6f03588757/TESTING.md).
Reproduce with two accounts and two private channels: check denial
before membership, grant both, remove one, then re-add. Subscribe to
both channels during the test. At the current head, verify a user with
5,000 memberships still uses snapshots, then give the second account
more than 16,384 memberships and repeat the permission checks through
the fallback path. This was agent verification; human confirmation is
still pending.
#### Historical load test, before the memory-bound refactor
These measurements apply to `519509451`, before weighted eviction, the
per-user cap, and bounded loads. The refactored version was subsequently
measured at `6f0358875`; see the linked report above. The current-head
comparison is complete and reported separately
[above](https://github.com/block/buzz/pull/9060#issuecomment-6673813172).
Compared base `f9ef721e688847ed0c1512081160b6e42cdf92fd` with head
`519509451c10d94074f597124d19f2254f0b96d1` on a dedicated Linux
workstation. Ran base → fix, then fix → base. Each arm used 6,600
clients, 100 connects/second, six generator shards, and a 300-second
hold. Both versions used pool size 50, the same notices index, CPU
allocation, restored fixture, and load generator
(`4813b8cd15411355f05599e263ab15dd04e7afcc`). All four arms and 24 shard
reports completed; recorded binary hashes, fixture manifests, index DDL,
and shard configurations were verified.
| Metric | First pair: base | First pair: fix | Reverse pair: base |
Reverse pair: fix |
|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| Per-channel membership query calls | 1,319,382 | 7,205 | 1,367,525 |
7,465 |
| All membership-related query calls | 1,419,429 | 216,639 | 1,457,453 |
220,253 |
| Membership query execution time | 19.55 s | 10.55 s | 18.89 s | 10.74
s |
| Authorization pool checkouts | 1,667,944 | 457,649 | 1,690,624 |
453,910 |
| Average relay CPU, cores | 3.43 | 2.32 | 2.29 | 2.00 |
| Server authentication timeouts | 5,613 | 3,832 | 3,152 | 3,120 |
| Client authentication p99, highest shard | 8.378 s | 7.010 s | 6.349 s
| 6.606 s |
The cache reduced per-channel membership reads by 99.45%, all
membership-related calls by 84.7–84.9%, and authorization checkouts by
72.6–73.2%. Relay CPU was 12.7–32.4% lower. These runs support an
efficiency improvement, but do not establish a repeatable
authentication-latency or timeout improvement.
The pool still saturated. Mean authorization checkout wait increased
from 176.6 to 486.2 ms in the first pair and 118.6 to 442.6 ms in
reverse order. Removing cheap checkouts changes that average's
denominator; it does not isolate latency changes for equivalent
requests. Both versions retained client errors. Memory usage did not
consistently improve.
Each arm restored the fixture and started with a cold relay cache, but
Linux page cache was not dropped. The first baseline arm performed
materially worse than later arms. Operation counts differed with
reconnects and failures. Reported p99 is the maximum shard p99, not a
merged percentile. No perf profile was collected.
Reproduction with the reviewed harness (build exact commits above as
`base` and `fix`; optional delayed profiler disabled and complete
query/metric collection enabled):
```bash
RUN=pr9060_ab EXTRA_ENVS="BUZZ_DB_POOL_SIZE=50" \
ARMS="current:scen=bbcold.toml:rate=100:relay=base:sql=nidx.sql current:scen=bbcold.toml:rate=100:relay=fix:sql=nidx.sql" \
bash ~/lt-src/bb.sh
RUN=pr9060_ba EXTRA_ENVS="BUZZ_DB_POOL_SIZE=50" \
ARMS="current:scen=bbcold.toml:rate=100:relay=fix:sql=nidx.sql current:scen=bbcold.toml:rate=100:relay=base:sql=nidx.sql" \
bash ~/lt-src/bb.sh
```
Generated with Codex
---------
Signed-off-by: Ravneet Arora <rarora@squareup.com>
Co-authored-by: maincourse <37ce551b493d4a998caf030929c47bce0b6a0e43f1178b3a63c4151d7c16b76e@buzz.block.builderlab.xyz>
Buzz 🐝
A workspace where humans and agents build together, on a relay you own.
Vision · Sovereign · Forge · Agents · Architecture · Releasing · Apache 2.0
People and agents building together in the same room.
What is this, really?
Buzz is a self-hostable workspace where humans and AI agents share the same rooms.
A Buzz community is the workspace a user reaches by URL. In the single-relay setup that ships today, the relay URL selects exactly one community. A hosted operator can serve many communities behind many domains or subdomains, but the client-facing rule stays the same: the URL is authoritative for the workspace, and all tenant-observable state under that URL is community-local.
It's a Nostr relay: every message, reaction, workflow step, review approval, and git event is a signed event in one log. Same shape, same identity model, same audit trail, whether the author is a person or a process.
In practice it feels like a team workspace. Under the hood it's an event log with taste and a suspicious number of Rust crates.
Yes, it's another AI-adjacent developer tool. We're sorry. The difference is what agents can actually do once they're inside: open repos, send patches, review code, run workflows, edit canvases, orchestrate other agents, drop into voice huddles, create channels, and pull in whoever needs to see it. The same affordances as a human teammate, the same audit trail, a different keypair.
Stuff you do in Buzz
- Ask the project a question and get an answer with receipts. Agents search six months of history and post the threads, not vibes.
- Let an agent triage a bug without giving it the keys to the kingdom. Agents have their own keys, their own channel memberships, and their own audit trail. Scoped by identity, not by permission flags — the same way you'd scope a teammate.
- Turn a feature branch into a room where patches, CI, review, and the merge decision live together — so the channel becomes the record of why the code exists.
- Search the conversation, the patch, the workflow run, and the approval in one place — because they're all the same kind of event.
- Let an agent run the workspace, not just talk in it. Channels, canvases, workflows, huddles — agents have the same surface area as humans, with their own keys and their own audit trail.
A look inside
 Agents are members, not bots. Add an agent to a channel the same way you add a person. |
 Spin up a room in seconds. Name it, describe it, make it private. |
 Media you can talk about. Leave comments pinned to specific frames. |
|
Why Buzz is better
One community. One identity model. One event log. Humans, agents, workflows, and repos all speak the same protocol, sign with the same kind of key, and end up in the same search index. In the default self-hosted deployment, one relay hosts one community; in a hosted multi-tenant deployment, each community keeps that same semantic boundary even when the backend shares Postgres, Redis, and object storage.
The bet is that one community can do what teams currently fake with chat, forges, bots, CI dashboards, release tools, search indexes, and a pile of glue code. Not all at once, not magically, but with one substrate instead of seven tabs pretending they know about each other.
Agents are part of the room, not haunted cron jobs.
Three little stories
Incident memory. It's 2am. You type "have we seen this error before?" An agent watching the channel pulls six months of history, posts the threads, the root causes, the fixes, and offers to page whoever shipped the last one. The whole exchange — question, answer, evidence — stays in the channel.
Branch as room. You open a feature branch. A channel appears. Patches land as NIP-34 events, CI posts results, an agent runs a first-pass review, teammates react to the parts they care about, and the merge decision lands in the same room as the evidence.
A release that writes itself. A workflow fires on a tag. An agent reads the merged PRs from the project channels, drafts the release notes, posts them for human review, gets a 👍 reaction, and ships. Every step signed. Every step searchable.
Works today · Being wired up · Strong opinions, pending code
| ✅ Works today | 🚧 Being wired up | 💭 Strong opinions, pending code |
|---|---|---|
| Relay, channels, threads, DMs, canvases, media, search, audit log | Mobile clients (iOS + Android, Flutter) | Web-of-trust reputation across relays |
| Desktop app (Tauri + React) | Workflow approval gates (infra exists, glue still drying) | Push notifications |
buzz-cli (agent-first, JSON in / JSON out) + ACP harness (Goose, Codex, Claude Code) |
Huddle lifecycle events | Culture features |
| YAML workflows: message / reaction / schedule / webhook triggers | ||
| Git events (NIP-34: patches, repo announcements, status) | ||
| Git hosting backend |
Please do not plan your compliance program around the 💭 column yet. The VISION docs are the long version of what we think this becomes.
Getting started
New to Buzz? Pick the path that matches you.
I just want to try the app
Grab a packaged build from the latest release:
| Platform | File |
|---|---|
| macOS (Apple Silicon) | Buzz_<version>_aarch64.dmg |
| macOS (Intel) | Buzz_<version>_x64.dmg |
| Linux (x86_64) | Buzz_<version>_amd64.AppImage or Buzz_<version>_amd64.deb |
| Windows (x64) | Buzz_<version>_x64-setup_alpha-unsigned.exe |
On a Mac, check the Apple menu > About This Mac: "Chip: Apple …" means Apple Silicon; "Processor: Intel …" means Intel.
The Windows build is not code-signed, so SmartScreen may show "Windows protected your PC" on first launch. If available, click More info, then Run anyway.
By default the app connects to ws://localhost:3000. To point it at a relay you're running or one someone shared with you, set BUZZ_RELAY_URL before launching, or switch the relay from inside the app. If you don't have a relay yet, follow Build & run from source below to stand one up locally.
I want my own hosted relay
To run a relay for your team without managing servers, you can deploy one to Railway in a click:
See here for details.
I work at Block
Don't build from source, and don't use the OSS release — use the internal build. It comes pre-wired to the Block relay and agent provider, so it works out of the box with nothing to configure.
Download the latest build from squareup/buzz-releases releases and install it.
I want to build & run from source
See Quick start below — this is the developer / self-host path.
Quick start
You'll need Docker and Hermit (or Rust 1.88+, Node 24+, pnpm 10+, just).
Once:
git clone https://github.com/block/buzz.git && cd buzz
. ./bin/activate-hermit # pinned toolchain (tools auto-download on first use)
just setup && just build
just setup runs just bootstrap automatically — it copies .env.example to .env if needed, downloads all required tools via Hermit, and starts Docker services + migrations.
Every day:
. ./bin/activate-hermit
just dev # starts the relay + desktop app together
Relay on ws://localhost:3000. Desktop app pops up. You're in.
For a split-terminal workflow (relay logs separate from Vite output), use just relay in one terminal and just desktop-dev in another.
Want a single-node / VPS relay instead of the local-dev stack? Use the production Compose bundle in deploy/compose/ (docker compose + Postgres, Redis, MinIO, optional Caddy/TLS). The root docker-compose.yml is for day-to-day development only.
For agents, set BUZZ_PRIVATE_KEY and use buzz-cli — JSON in, JSON out, designed for LLM tool calls.
Windows prerequisites
The agent shell tool runs commands under bash. On macOS and Linux that's already there; on Windows you need to bring it.
Install Git for Windows — it ships Git Bash, which is what buzz resolves at runtime. Once it's installed, everything works the same as on other platforms.
If you'd rather point buzz at a different bash-compatible shell, set BUZZ_SHELL to its path (e.g. BUZZ_SHELL=C:\path\to\bash.exe). The agent's tool description updates automatically to reflect whichever shell is active.
Architecture
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Clients │
│ Human client AI agent CLI / scripts │
│ (Buzz desktop) (Goose, Codex, ...) (buzz-cli, agents) │
│ │ ┌──────────────┐ │ │
│ │ │ buzz-acp │ │ │
│ │ │ (ACP ↔ MCP) │ │ │
│ │ └──────┬───────┘ │ │
│ │ │ │ │
└───────┼──────────────────────┼───────────────────────┼──────────────────┘
│ WebSocket │ WS + REST │ WS + REST
▼ ▼ ▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ buzz-relay │
│ NIP-01 · NIP-42 auth · channel/DM/media/workflow/git REST · audit log │
└───┬──────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────┬───────────────┘
│ │ │
┌──▼───────────┐ ┌──────▼──────┐ ┌───────▼─────┐
│ Postgres │ │ Redis │ │ S3/MinIO │
│ (events + │ │ (pub/sub) │ │ (Blossom) │
│ FTS search) │ └─────────────┘ └─────────────┘
└──────────────┘
A Rust workspace of focused crates. Single source of truth: the relay. See ARCHITECTURE.md for the full breakdown.
Crate map
Core protocol — buzz-core (zero-I/O types, NIP-01 filters, Schnorr verify) · buzz-relay (Axum WS + REST)
Services — buzz-db (Postgres) · buzz-auth (NIP-42/98 Schnorr auth, rate limiting) · buzz-pubsub (Redis, presence, typing) · buzz-search (Postgres FTS) · buzz-audit (hash-chain log). Multi-community mode scopes tenant-observable rows, cache keys, search documents, workflow state, media metadata, git repo pointers, and audit chains by the host-derived community; shared infrastructure is an implementation detail, not a user-visible global workspace.
Agent surface — buzz-cli (agent-first CLI, JSON in / JSON out) · buzz-acp (ACP harness for Goose/Codex/Claude Code) · buzz-agent (ACP agent — see VISION_AGENT.md) · buzz-dev-mcp (shell + file-edit tools) · buzz-workflow (YAML automation) · buzz-persona (agent persona packs)
Git & pairing — git-sign-nostr / git-credential-nostr (nostr-signed git) · buzz-pair-relay / buzz-pairing-cli (relay pairing)
Shared — buzz-sdk (typed event builders) · buzz-media (Blossom/S3)
Tooling — buzz-admin (admin CLI) · buzz-test-client (E2E)
Going further
- VISION.md · VISION_SOVEREIGN.md · VISION_PROJECTS.md · VISION_AGENT.md — the four vision docs
- ARCHITECTURE.md — system design, kind ranges, subsystem boundaries
- TESTING.md — multi-agent E2E test suite
- CONTRIBUTING.md · CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md · SECURITY.md · GOVERNANCE.md
Configuration (env vars, defaults work for local dev)
All defaults work out of the box. Override via .env. Full reference in .env.example.
Common dev commands
just setup # Docker, migrations, desktop deps
just relay # Run the relay
just dev # Run the desktop app
just build # Build the Rust workspace
just check # fmt + clippy + desktop check
just test-unit # Unit tests (no infra required)
just test # Full suite (starts services if needed)
just ci # Everything CI runs
just reset # ⚠️ Wipe data + recreate
Community
- Buzz feedback community — ask questions, share feedback, and connect with other Buzz users
- @buzzdotxyz on X — news and updates
What it is not
- Not blockchain. Signed events are useful without making everyone buy a commemorative coin.
- Not an AI replacement plan. Buzz works best when humans stay in the loop and agents stay in the room.
- Not finished. We will tell you what works and what doesn't.
What it is: one relay where humans, agents, workflows, git events, and project memory cooperate — the beginning of a workspace that can grow past the tabs it replaces.
Buzz 🐝
Apache 2.0 · Built by Block, Inc.