The depth was conservative because pre-0.21.8 a full sync_file_range
stall on NFS could traverse this channel and pin the producer. With
0.21.8's restored Phase 2.5 writer thread + 128 MiB byte-bounded ring
inside WritebackFile, every blocking syscall happens downstream of
this channel — never on it. The original "smaller buffer reduces
backpressure risk" rationale no longer applies.
Empirical (2026-05-15 Civil War UHD remux on 0.21.8): 30.9 MB/s
sustained but instantaneous samples spanning 9-53 MB/s, stdev 9.3.
Distribution clusters 52% of samples in 25-35 MB/s but has a long
9-15 MB/s tail. The tail corresponds to brief stalls in the matroska
builder when the sink momentarily lags — exactly the case a deeper
inter-thread channel covers. 32 frames at PES-frame sizes is still
well under a megabyte of additional memory, so the cost is zero.
MattJackson
d703ce439b