Operations

Generate the PostgreSQL installation through Igniter or the deterministic Mix task:

mix igniter.install ash_onetime --repo MyApp.Repo
mix ash_onetime.gen.migrations --repo MyApp.Repo
mix ecto.migrate

The migration creates authoritative idempotency claims, nonce claims, response payload partitions, collision constraints, cleanup functions, and deletion guards. Claim parents may be unpartitioned or hash-partitioned by operation_hash; response payloads use date partitions plus a default partition. All identifiers are quoted and every operation keeps the operation hash in its logical key.

Run bounded cleanup manually or with the optional Oban worker:

mix ash_onetime.prune --repo MyApp.Repo --batch-size 500

Cleanup deletes only claims strictly past their replay/retention horizon, keeps processing external recovery points, removes response bytes atomically with completed claims, and drops only empty expired payload partitions after obtaining the required lock. Batch size and prefix are explicit. Schedule AshOnetime.Oban.CleanupWorker only if Oban is installed.

Abandoned external processing claims — committed recovery points whose peer effect never settles and that no retry ever recovers — are immortal under cleanup (it skips them) and the delete guard (it forbids deleting them). Left unbounded this is a storage denial of service. AshOnetime.Store.reap(target, batch_size, abandonment_seconds) is an opt-in, bounded reaper that deletes such claims past a separate, much longer abandonment horizon. A claim is reaped only when it is older than both abandonment_seconds and a hard 1-day floor and past its own retention horizon (all re-enforced by the delete guard), so an in-flight or in-retention recovery point is never removed. abandonment_seconds must be at least the 1-day floor. Schedule it far less frequently than cleanup (recoverability becomes bounded by max(retention, abandonment)), and size the horizon well beyond any legitimate in-flight window.

Run the reaper manually or with the optional Oban worker, mirroring cleanup:

mix ash_onetime.reap --repo MyApp.Repo --abandonment-seconds 1209600

--abandonment-seconds defaults to 604800 (7 days) and must be at least the 86400-second (1 day) floor; --batch-size defaults to 500. Schedule AshOnetime.Oban.ReapWorker only if Oban is installed, on its own far slower cadence than AshOnetime.Oban.CleanupWorker. Before reaping, observe the backlog with AshOnetime.Store.processing_backlog(target), which returns {:ok, %{processing_count: n, oldest_age_seconds: seconds}} (oldest_age_seconds is nil when no recovery points are in flight) — watch it grow to detect abandonment accumulation and to size the abandonment horizon above the oldest legitimate in-flight claim. Existing deployments installed before the reaper existed must, in a manual migration, CREATE OR REPLACE the ash_onetime_guard_idempotency_delete function with the new body (the attached trigger keeps pointing at the same name), CREATE the ash_onetime_reap_idempotency function, and CREATE the ash_onetime_idempotency_claims_processing_index. Copy those three definitions from a freshly generated install migration (mix ash_onetime.gen.migrations), changing the guard's CREATE FUNCTION to CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION. Until they are applied a reap attempt fails closed against the old guard.

Forward response partitions

The ash_onetime_response_payloads table is range-partitioned by month. The install migration generates a fixed window (install month through +12). Cleanup drops only past, empty named partitions; the _default partition is excluded from drop enumeration. Once retention exceeds the generated window, payloads route to _default and are never dropped — silently defeating bounded retention. Forward monthly partition creation keeps the window ahead of retention:

mix ash_onetime.roll_partitions --repo MyApp.Repo --months 6

--months (default 3, 1..24) sets how many forward months to ensure exist. The roll is idempotent and concurrency-safe (advisory-locked, bounded lock_timeout), so concurrent or overlapping runs are safe. Schedule AshOnetime.Oban.PartitionWorker (or a cron cadence) ahead of your retention horizon — missing it causes new writes to route to _default, so the roll is more time-sensitive than cleanup/reap. Existing installs that predate the roll or have crossed the window should generate and run the forward migration once:

mix ash_onetime.gen.roll_forward --repo MyApp.Repo --months 18
mix ecto.migrate

It adds the response_partition index, back-fills the elapsed+forward partitions, and drains past-retention payloads stranded in _default (a claim-scoped delete; the delete guard removes the payload). Within-retention stranded payloads are left — a retry under a new key is a new execution, and the rolled-forward partitions now route future inserts correctly.

Gap recovery: roll_partitions only creates partitions ahead of the current month — it does not back-fill. If the worker/cron is down for a month or longer, that month's within-retention payloads strand in _default (which cleanup never drops). Re-running mix ash_onetime.gen.roll_forward is the recovery procedure: its drain is idempotent and removes any past-retention payloads that aged out while the roll was down. An exhausted PartitionWorker (max_attempts: 3 discards persistent failures) leaves the same gap — monitor for discarded jobs and re-run the forward migration when the worker has been down across a month boundary.

Worker backoff and discard alert. Each Oban worker (CleanupWorker, PartitionWorker, ReapWorker) declares a bounded, jittered backoff/1 (30–120 s across the three attempts) rather than Oban's default exponential, so a transient failure — lock contention on the unique index, a slow query, a momentary checkout pressure — retries within minutes instead of pushing the next attempt to hours. A job that exhausts its 3 attempts is discarded; for the retention-critical PartitionWorker a discard strands a month of bounded retention. Alert on discarded jobs:

SELECT queue, attempt, max_attempts, inserted_at, discarded_at
FROM oban_jobs
WHERE state = 'discarded' AND queue IN ('ash_onetime_cleanup', 'ash_onetime_reap')
  AND discarded_at > now() - interval '24 hours';

A discarded PartitionWorker is the signal to run mix ash_onetime.gen.roll_forward (its drain is idempotent). A rising discard rate on any of the three queues is contention — inspect pg_stat_activity for lock waits during the worker's window and consider raising the pool or scheduling the worker off-peak.

A context-multitenant tenant prefix must be 1..63 bytes — PostgreSQL truncates identifiers at 63 bytes (NAMEDATALEN), so a longer prefix could route two tenants to the same schema. Both admission and cleanup reject an out-of-range prefix (admission fails closed with :missing_prefix) rather than truncating.

Configure an optional completed-response cache with config :ash_onetime, :cache, MyCache and a bounded :cache_timeout. Implement AshOnetime.Cache; treat every value as untrusted. The default AshOnetime.Cache.None needs no application configuration or supervision tree.

AshOnetime.Plug can copy configured headers into conn.private.ash_onetime.untrusted; it does not verify them. Trusted verification remains inside the protected action.

Telemetry events are [:ash_onetime, event], where event is :admission, :conflict, :replay, :fingerprint_mismatch, :verification, :encoding, :cache, :cleanup, :reap, :external_recovery, :store_uncertainty, or :untracked_execution. The :reap event carries a :claims_reaped count for each bounded reaper run. Metadata is exactly strategy, resource, action, and result_class; measurements are only duration or count. Raw keys, scopes, tokens, fingerprints, payloads, signatures, resolver identities, exceptions, and store results are never telemetry fields.

DPoP replay fence operational characteristics

A :one_time_nonce protection with commit: :independent (the DPoP §11.1 replay fence, ADR-0003) routes its claim through the claim_committed worker, which spawns a process that opens its own transaction on its own connection. Two operational characteristics apply, inherited from the external-effect path but now exercised per-request rather than per-external-effect:

• Connection-pool pressure. The worker needs a checkout from the same pool while the caller's before_action still holds one — effectively +1 connection per in-flight protected request. Under pool_size N concurrent protected actions, the (N+1)th blocks waiting for a checkout; under sustained burst this surfaces as latency and, at the limit, a :checkout_unavailable rejection (which fails closed — the request is rejected, never admitted unsafely). Size the pool for the expected concurrency of DPoP-protected endpoints.
• 30s worker timeout. If the worker stalls (slow query, lock contention on the unique index, pool pressure), before_action blocks for up to 30s before the worker times out and returns a :worker_timeout result, which surfaces as a [:ash_onetime, :store_uncertainty] telemetry event with result_class: :worker_timeout and a typed store error. This is distinct from a genuine disconnect (result_class: :disconnected) and from other unknown dispatches (result_class: :unknown): all three fail closed and none can cause a silent re-admit, but the :worker_timeout class names the stall condition an operator should triage as pool/lock/contention (raise the pool, inspect the slow query) rather than a network partition (the :disconnected triage). A rising :worker_timeout rate is the signal to size the pool for DPoP-protected concurrency.

The fence's fail-closed posture means neither characteristic can reopen the replay gap the fence exists to close — the worst case is rejection under stress, never a double-spend.

Runbooks

Named procedures for the operational failure modes the library surfaces. Each names the symptom, the diagnostic query, and the remediation. Every procedure is safe to run against a live authoritative store unless noted.

backlog-stuck — abandoned processing recovery points accumulating

Symptom. [:ash_onetime, :external_recovery] with result_class: :outcome_unknown sustained over time, or processing_backlog/1 showing a growing processing_count whose oldest_age_seconds exceeds any legitimate in-flight window. Abandoned external-effect recovery points are immortal under cleanup (it skips processing claims) and the delete guard forbids deleting them; left unbounded this is a storage-exhaustion denial of service (ADR-0002).

Diagnose. Observe the backlog before reaping:

{:ok, %{processing_count: n, oldest_age_seconds: age}} =
  AshOnetime.Store.processing_backlog(target)

Or directly in SQL (replace :prefix):

SELECT count(*) AS processing_count,
       extract(epoch from now() - min(inserted_at))::int AS oldest_age_seconds
FROM "ash_onetime_idempotency_claims"
WHERE state = 'processing';

Remediate. If oldest_age_seconds is well beyond any legitimate in-flight window (e.g. days), run the bounded reaper with an abandonment_seconds sized above your longest legitimate in-flight claim but below the point where storage pressure bites:

mix ash_onetime.reap --repo MyApp.Repo --abandonment-seconds 1209600 --batch-size 500

--abandonment-seconds (default 604800 = 7 days, minimum 86400 = 1 day) must be at least the 1-day floor; the reaper re-enforces both this floor and each claim's own retention horizon via the delete guard, so an in-flight or in-retention recovery point is never removed. Reaping an abandoned claim means a later retry re-inserts under a new claim id and executes as a new peer operation (ADR-0002). Schedule AshOnetime.Oban.ReapWorker on a slow cadence to keep this bounded steady-state rather than a manual fire drill.

partition-discard-detected — a PartitionWorker exhausted its retries

Symptom. A discarded PartitionWorker job on the ash_onetime_cleanup queue. This strands a month of bounded retention: new payloads route to _default and are never dropped (ADR-0001). The bounded jittered backoff (ADR-0005) retries transient failures within minutes, so a discard means a persistent failure (a malformed argument, an unresolvable repo, a DDL error) — not a transient stall.

Diagnose. Alert on discarded jobs:

SELECT queue, attempt, max_attempts, inserted_at, discarded_at, args
FROM oban_jobs
WHERE state = 'discarded' AND queue = 'ash_onetime_cleanup'
  AND discarded_at > now() - interval '24 hours'
ORDER BY discarded_at DESC;

Check whether the current month's partition exists:

SELECT count(*)
FROM pg_inherits
JOIN pg_class parent ON parent.oid = pg_inherits.inhparent
JOIN pg_namespace n ON n.oid = parent.relnamespace
WHERE n.nspname = ':prefix'
  AND parent.relname = 'ash_onetime_response_payloads'
  AND pg_inherits.inhrelid::regclass::text LIKE '%_default';
-- a non-zero count here means payloads are routing to _default (the catch-all),
-- i.e. the forward window has lapsed.

Remediate. A discarded PartitionWorker triggers the idempotent forward migration, which both creates the elapsed+forward partitions AND drains past-retention payloads stranded in _default:

mix ash_onetime.gen.roll_forward --repo MyApp.Repo --months 18
mix ecto.migrate

Then re-schedule the PartitionWorker (or cron) ahead of the retention horizon so the window does not lapse again. A rising discard rate on the partition or cleanup queues is contention — see pool-saturated.

pool-saturated — worker timeouts or checkout failures rising

Symptom. [:ash_onetime, :store_uncertainty] with result_class: :worker_timeout climbing, or :checkout_unavailable ([:ash_onetime, :untracked_execution] may follow for opted-in idempotency). The committed-claim worker needs a +1 connection checkout per in-flight protected request (ADR-0003); under pool_size N concurrent protected actions the (N+1)th blocks, and at the limit the 30s worker timeout fires. All paths fail closed — the worst case is rejection under stress, never a double-spend — but a rising rate degrades the DPoP-protected endpoint.

Diagnose. Confirm the timeout class is the dominant uncertainty signal (distinct from :disconnected, which is a network partition, and :unknown, which is an unspecified dispatch):

-- in your telemetry backend, filter the store_uncertainty stream:
-- result_class = 'worker_timeout' (rising) vs 'disconnected' vs 'unknown'

Inspect live lock waits and checkout pressure during the worker's window:

SELECT activity.state, activity.wait_event_type, activity.wait_event,
       count(*)
FROM pg_stat_activity activity
WHERE activity.state != 'idle'
GROUP BY 1, 2, 3
ORDER BY count(*) DESC;

# DBConnection checkout queue length (EctoMyApp.Repo substituted):
{:ok, %{checkin_queue: q, total_connections: t}} =
  MyXQL or Postgrex connection info # via DBConnection's :telemetry on [:db_connection, :checkout, *]

Remediate. Raise the pool size to accommodate the (N+1) checkout pattern for the expected concurrency of DPoP-protected endpoints:

config :my_app, MyApp.Repo, pool_size: 20  # was 10, for example

If the timeout class is :disconnected instead, triage as a network partition (check pg_stat_activity for connection churn, the load balancer, the Postgres instance health) — not a pool-sizing issue. If it is :unknown, inspect the worker's exit reason in the Oban job or application logs; that class names an unspecified dispatch failure a pool raise will not fix.

Key rotation

Token verification resolves material by the signed key identifier. Add a new key before using it to sign. Retain every old verification key until the last token it signed is outside max_age + clock_skew, then remove it. An unknown key identifier fails verification; never fall back silently to a different key.

The supported runtime is Elixir ~> 1.20 (verified on 1.20.2) and Erlang/OTP 29 with Ash >= 3.31.1, AshPostgres 2, and PostgreSQL 18. Release checks include the full suite, mutation matrix, warnings-as-errors documentation, exact Hex archive inspection, and an unpacked zero-configuration consumer, all run on the runtime pinned in .tool-versions; see CONTRIBUTING.