The dashboard's host widgets took 18-60 s. Every "latest reading" query
(hosts overview, host-agent fleet, host page, vitals, SNMP, MCP get_host)
searched plugin_metrics for the newest row per metric. Postgres has no skip
scan, so each one read every raw sample in the 7-day window.
- plugin_metric_latest: one row per (source, resource, metric).
record_metrics upserts it in the same transaction, moving forward only and
in sorted key order. Migration 0030 seeds it by stepping the existing index.
- Retention drops a latest row once its sample leaves the raw window, so a
resource that stopped reporting disappears when its history does, as before.
Renames carry it along.
- A quiet host keeps its last values, marked stale. A time-bounded query
would have shown it as missing.
- Vitals sparklines span the 6 h they claim, averaged in SQL to ~120 points,
instead of fetching 6 h raw and drawing the last 120 samples.
- Dashboard and share-view cells: "Loading…" until the first answer; a 20 s
deadline per fetch; "Couldn't load (why)" with Retry now and an automatic
retry for cells that don't poll; "as of HH:MM" in the header, and
"couldn't refresh · as of" when a refresh fails over shown data.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>