- README: recorder row + architecture diagram reflect fold->parquet-> 15-min mirror (and research/ joins the diagram); cheat-sheet gains a 'sync the tape now' row - HANDOFF: snapshot dated 2026-07-21, launchd roster (tape-sync + research-nightly wait behavior), #15 back in the open queue, tape ops line in quick-reference - recorder/README: ops block (sync_tape + fold health, deploy gap note), storage economics (/mo, mirror as Stage-1 feedstock) - research/README: nightly.sh wait-for-fresh-tape semantics - live/tape_sharps.json: refreshed 4-day chain-validated screen (the smoke run had briefly left a chain-less version) Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
RECORDER — the full RTDS firehose tape
Third silo: records everything Polymarket's real-time socket emits — every trade, every order match (the maker side of each fill), every market comment, every crypto price tick — into a durable, queryable archive. ~8M events/day, ~$10/month all-in (1GB VM + volume). No keys, no repo clone (code baked into the image), no shared anything with the trading bots: a recorder crash can never touch trading, a bot deploy can never gap the tape.
Capture design (why it's ~complete)
- Dual sockets to
wss://ws-live-data.polymarket.com, both subscribed toactivity/*+comments/*+crypto_prices/*(rfq/pricesprobed dead 2026-07-19). The stream silences per-CONNECTION every ~10 min; a single socket measured 92.9% minute-coverage — the twin covers each gap. Cross-socket dedupe on (tx, asset, side, size, price) for trades, payload-hash for aux; a 15s per-connection stale guard (at 3k+ msg/min, 5s of silence is pathological; false trips cost nothing with a twin). - Segments: hour-rotated to the volume —
rtds_YYYYMMDD_HH.jsonl.gz(trades, stable schema) +aux_…(everything else, raw payloads). - Preservation (user directive 2026-07-19, STRENGTHENED by Stage 0
2026-07-21): nothing is deleted without a verified second copy. The
fold sidecar deletes a raw gz only after its Parquet re-reads with a
matching row count; the disk guard deletes Parquet only oldest-first and
only files the Mac mirror has ACKED. The recorder's own last-resort
guard (95% -> drop oldest,
⚠⚠ TAPE LOSS) still protects the live tape from a full disk.
Stage-0 warehouse (2026-07-21): fold on the box, mirror on the Mac
fold.py(sidecar in the same machine, capture is PID 1): every 2 min, each closed gz segment becomes/data/parquet/<family>/date=YYYY-MM-DD/<segment>.parquet(zstd), row-parity verified, appended to/data/parquet/manifest.jsonl, then the gz is deleted. The volume IS the warehouse: immutable Parquet any client mirrors incrementally. duckdb capped at 384MB (1GB VM) so a busy-hour fold can never starve capture. ~250-400MB/day of parquet -> months of headroom, months more once mirrored+acked files get pruned.sync_tape.py(Mac, every 15 min viacom.jaxperro.tape-sync+ from daily.sh): pulls new manifest entries overflyctl sftp, row-verifies each file, appends its rows intolive/rtds.duckdb's native tables (research keeps native speed — views-over-parquet was rejected: per-asset point queries would crawl), records it iningested, ACKs the box (/data/parquet/acks/<f>.ok). Tape freshness went from "nightly, if the Mac was awake" to ~15 min whenever awake, and the box no longer depends on the Mac to stay healthy for weeks.bootstrap_parquet.py: one-shot export of the pre-fold history (2026-07-17..21, existed only in rtds.duckdb) into the mirror — ran 2026-07-21, parity OK (13.84M trades + 3.07M aux).live/parquet/is the complete durable layer Stage 1 (MotherDuck/ClickHouse) would consume.
The legacy bulk ingest (fallback)
recorder/ingest.py (sftp-first, base64 fallback, integrity guards) stays
as the fallback path for a fold-less recorder; with fold running it finds
no gz segments and no-ops. Same idempotence keys (ingested by segment
name) as sync_tape, so the two can never double-insert.
Ops
flyctl logs -a wwf-recorder --no-tail # capture: "tape: N trades/min"
flyctl logs -a wwf-recorder --no-tail | grep '\[fold\]' # fold health
python3 recorder/sync_tape.py # manual mirror pull any time
# (launchd does it every 15 min)
flyctl deploy --remote-only -c fly.recorder.toml -a wwf-recorder --ha=false
# ANY code change = image rebuild
# (~30-60s capture gap — deploy rarely)
flyctl ssh console -a wwf-recorder -C "df -h /data" # volume headroom
Storage: parquet ~250-400MB/day on both the volume and the Mac mirror
(live/parquet/); rtds.duckdb adds ~0.5-0.8GB/day on the Mac. The mirror
IS the Stage-1 warehouse feedstock (MotherDuck/ClickHouse = a load job,
not a migration); if local disk ever matters, old mirror partitions can be
cold-stored — they are immutable and manifest-indexed.