Files
HealthLog/docs/ops
Marc-André Bombeck 13a9aacf20 fix(backup): stream the nightly off-host upload instead of building it
The off-host job was said to benefit from the streaming work the weekly
in-database backup got, and it did not. Only the payload builder was
shared: `runOffhostBackup` called `buildFullBackupJson` for the whole
document, `gzipSync` over that whole string, a whole-buffer
`createCipheriv` pass over the result, and handed the finished buffer to
a single `PutObject`. Four full copies of the record alive at once, on
the same arithmetic the weekly pass had already been fixed for.

Configuring an S3 target on a long-lived record therefore restarted the
container. On an account of 445 000 measurements the JSON alone is
242 MB, and against a 1 GB container's 524 MB heap the run died of heap
exhaustion seventeen seconds in — taking every signed-in session with
it, because the job shares the app process.

The write path is a stream end to end now: `streamFullBackupJson`
produces the document a page at a time, gzip and an incremental
AES-256-GCM writer consume it as it arrives, and `@aws-sdk/lib-storage`
puts it up in two 8 MB parts. What the process holds is fixed by the
pipeline's shape rather than by the record. Measured on that same
445 000-measurement account under `--max-old-space-size=450`, with the
heap pre-loaded to what a warm server holds: the old path dies with
`Ineffective mark-compacts near heap limit`, the new one finishes with a
peak 79 MB above its baseline and writes a 9.1 MB object.

The stored envelope gains version 3, which moves the GCM tag from in
front of the ciphertext to the end. That is the only change the stream
required — the tag exists only once the last block is in, so a leading
one means the whole object must exist before its first byte can be sent.
Nothing about the authentication moves: the tag still covers every
ciphertext byte and is verified before a byte of plaintext comes back.
Versions 1 and 2 still read, so every object already in a bucket
restores through the same reader with no flag to tell them apart.

The incremental writer is the crypto module's, split into its byte-level
half so the base64 form the in-database blob uses and the raw form an
object needs are one implementation under two framings. The off-host key
handling is unchanged: a separate `BACKUP_ENCRYPTION_KEY`, 64 hex or
32-byte base64, passed in rather than looked up.

A run that uploaded nothing for anybody is a failed job now, not
`ok: true` with an empty bucket behind it. Wrong credentials, a missing
bucket and an unreachable endpoint all fail every account rather than
one, and the target's own sentence rides out as the cause. A run where
some account got a copy still succeeds; retrying the whole cohort over
one object would re-upload everybody's.

The one ceiling left is structural rather than a memory bound, and it is
counted rather than discovered: a multipart upload carries 10 000 parts,
so an object past 80 GB is refused for that account with a clear message
instead of failing halfway through with an SDK error about part numbers.

`tests/integration/offhost-backup-streaming-memory.test.ts` pins the
budget from both sides — what the streaming uploader holds, and that the
materialising path does not fit the same budget on the same fixture in
the same process, so the number cannot pass by measuring nothing.
2026-09-05 19:13:11 +02:00
..