v12.4.1

thedotmack/claude-memv12.4.1Apr 25, 2026by thedotmack

AI Summary

Major performance improvement that caches Chroma backfill watermarks to eliminate expensive per-restart metadata scans. Reduced Chroma CPU on worker restart from 422% to 0% and made backfill startup near-instant.

Key Highlights

New chroma-sync-state.json watermark cache per project
Backfill SQL optimized from NOT IN (huge list) to id > watermark
Chroma CPU on worker restart: 422% → 0%
Backfill startup time: seconds → near-instant
Watermark advances per batch for clean partial-failure resume

New Features

Chroma watermark caching for fast restarts

Full Release Notes

## perf(chroma): Cache backfill watermarks to skip per-restart Chroma scans

Worker restarts were re-scanning Chroma's full metadata for every project on every boot to determine which sqlite ids were already embedded. With ~253 projects and ~92k embeddings, this pegged `chroma-mcp` at 100–422% CPU on each spawn.

### What changed
- New `~/.claude-mem/chroma-sync-state.json` watermark cache — per-project highest synced sqlite_id for observations, summaries, and prompts.
- Backfill SQL changed from `id NOT IN (huge list)` to `id > watermark`.
- Live `syncObservation` / `syncSummary` / `syncUserPrompt` bump the watermark on success.
- One-time bootstrap derives initial watermarks from a single Chroma scan if the state file is missing — after that, Chroma metadata is never scanned again on startup.
- Watermark advances per batch, so partial-failure runs resume cleanly.

### Result
- Chroma CPU on worker restart: **422% → 0%**.
- State file size for 253 projects: **~3.7 KB**.
- Backfill startup time: **seconds → near-instant** after bootstrap.