Development Update — April 6

Skywire: Setup-Node Goroutine Leak Fix

Route setup-node goroutine leak (#2280) — a serious production issue: the setup-node was accumulating 500+ leaked goroutines within minutes of restart.

Root cause — MakeMap used an unbuffered results channel, causing goroutines to block forever on send when the reader stopped after the first error. Combined with no dial timeout, unreachable visors caused indefinite blocking in DialStream.readResponse.

The fix — added buffered channels and explicit dial/handler timeouts so stuck dials can’t accumulate. The setup-node now cleanly errors out and cleans up goroutines when it can’t reach a visor.

Config bootstrapper fallback — readConfig now returns an empty Config (using all embedded defaults) when the config file doesn’t exist, instead of fatally exiting. This means a fresh install without a config file just works with the embedded defaults, which is the common case for new users.

Hypervisor UI improvements — continued polish on the hypervisor interface, bundled into the same PR.

Setup-node pprof flags — replaced --pprof with --pprofmode/-q and --pprofaddr/-r to match visor flag conventions. Pprof is enabled with -q http. This unifies the pprof UX across all Skywire components.

DMSG: Session Ping Frequency Reduction

Session ping frequency reduced from 30s to 5m (#371), log level lowered from Debug to Trace.

The problem — the ping loop measures latency to DMSG servers for server selection. It is not a keepalive (yamux handles that). At 30-second intervals with many clients and many servers, this was generating N_clients × N_servers debug log lines every 30 seconds — potentially hundreds of lines per second on busy servers, flooding log files and wasting CPU on log formatting.

The fix — 5-minute intervals are more than sufficient for latency estimation (latencies don’t change that fast), and Trace-level logging means the messages are suppressed by default. Operators who need the detail can enable Trace logging explicitly.

Then the change was vendored into Skywire as commit 28ba3f1a (#2281), so production visors immediately benefit from the reduced log spam.

A quiet day focused on operational hygiene — reducing log noise, fixing goroutine leaks, and making the default install path smoother. Nothing flashy, but these kinds of fixes are what separate a prototype from a production system.