📦 WP-076 — perf(data): epoch-recycled loader workers

Research log · Phase 6 — Evaluation, v0.1.0

🔗 Depends on WP-014, WP-073 · Needed by WP-079

⬅️ WP-073 · Roadmap · WP-079 ➡️

WP-076 — epoch-recycled loader workers

WP-073's compact store did not end the OOMs: Colab still killed the run at epoch 24 and epoch 38. The residue is not one leak but a class of them — allocator high-water growth, arena fragmentation, and whatever copy-on-write pages survive — all of which are per-worker and none of which a dataset change reaches.

Respawning the pool costs seconds against a 9-minute epoch and hard-resets every one of them, so persistent_workers defaults off. This is a case where the cheap blunt fix dominates: no diagnosis of which allocator behaviour dominated was needed, because recycling ends all of them and the measurement said the cost was noise.