Two nights of debugging, one incident left to write about. The night of August 14th, a Claude Code session hung for an hour inside the VS Code extension, and I traced it to a per-token streaming stall — the previous two pieces, Two Clocks, Neither Lying and Coalescing the Stream, cover that hunt and the middleware that fixed it. The morning after, the same four-core box nearly went down under a load average of 38.7, and it turned out to be the same incident, twenty hours downstream. Nothing exploded that morning. A fuse had been burning since the previous afternoon, and 11:09 was simply when it reached the powder.
Reading the machine before touching it
The load numbers spoke first: 11.08, 38.69, 23.59 — one-minute, five-minute, fifteen-minute. A crisis still climbing shows the opposite order, disaster in the one-minute figure first; mine were falling, so the peak had already passed while I was still reading. Then /proc/pressure — PSI, the kernel's stall accounting for CPU, memory, and IO, and the closest thing a Linux box has to a memory of the last five minutes: memory full at 10 percent (processes genuinely stopped, waiting on page reclaim) and IO some at 45 percent. Memory pressure had turned into an IO storm.
