The subprocess-booting test suites hand-picked fixed ports in a cramped ~3955-4021 range, and
156-schedule-read-path deviated to a RANDOM port (3900 + rand%90) that overlapped those fixed
ports. Under CI load two servers could race on the same port, surfacing as flaky "no such table:
devices" / "FOREIGN KEY constraint failed" (a server answering a request against a half-migrated
or wrong DB). It's environmental — the suites pass locally and in isolation.
Fix: a shared test/helpers/free-port.js (bind :0 on loopback, read the OS-assigned port, release)
called in before() so every suite gets a guaranteed-unique ephemeral port — concurrent suites can
no longer collide, and no one has to hand-assign ports.
- Codemod converted 30 suites: const PORT = <fixed|random> -> let PORT (+ BASE) assigned via
`PORT = await freePort()` at the top of before().
- 3 hand-fixed (different structure): 148-eviction-storm (lowercase `base`), boot-health (no
before() — allocates PORT + a throwaway SEED_PORT inside the test, replacing the hardcoded
3894), totp-keyrotation (no before() — allocates at the test start before bootServer()).
No fixed 39xx/40xx ports remain. Full server suite 435/435; the 4 hand-touched suites pass in
isolation. Pure test-infra change — no app code touched.
Booting against a pre-bloated 300k-row device_status_log, /api/status answers in <3s
while the table is still large (chunked startup prune trickling in the background), and
the backlog drains to the cap with the server responsive throughout. The old whole-table
sort froze boot ~40s. Fallout doc gets the P2 findings section.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
