The display process ran three cleanup threads over one directory:
14:22:59.954 display_controller (the real manager)
14:22:59.973 startup validation, run 1 (discarded)
14:23:01.055 startup validation, run 2 (discarded)
Two of those managers existed only to read a directory path.
StartupValidator._validate_cache_directory built a whole CacheManager to
call get_cache_dir(), and validation runs twice -- once before the
plugin manager exists and again after. Each construction also probes
writability by writing and deleting .writetest on the card.
The discarded ones never went away. cleanup_loop closes over `self`, so
the thread keeps its manager alive: two objects that could never be
collected, waking every 24 hours to re-scan the same 9,000-file
directory. Nothing stopped them either -- stop_cleanup_thread had no
callers anywhere in the tree.
Two changes. The validator now takes the CacheManager the application
actually uses, which is also the more correct thing to validate; when
no caller supplies one it still builds its own, but stops the thread
afterwards. And CacheManager now tracks which directory it is sweeping,
so the second manager over a directory skips starting a thread at all.
That is the right granularity regardless of call sites: the sweep lists
a directory and deletes from it, so a second thread only duplicates the
scan. Ownership is released on stop, so a survivor can take over rather
than leaving the directory permanently unclaimed by a dead owner.
Measured directly, three managers over one directory: 3 threads before,
1 after.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Udr6MfaFLUPhX5Fgo67Jf5
