Over a serve connection, every scan-style read op costs ~350–600ms even when it matches zero or a handful of rows, because it appears to deserialize and CEL-evaluate every record in the datastore with no predicate pushdown or index. An indexed lookup (model.get) on the same connection is ~3ms, so the transport and dispatch are not the cost — the per-record scan is. A client that polls these reads therefore pays a full scan on every cycle.

Environment

swamp 20260718.081020.0-sha.fc14abbd
serve with token auth, single repo, ~581 total data records.

Measurements

A single persistent WS connection issues each op five times; medians below. The harness is a small polling probe (open one connection, time repeated reads).

op	payload	rows	median
`model.get`	one model by name	1	3ms
`data.query`	predicate matching nothing (`false`)	0	346ms
`data.query`	match-all (`true`)	581	490ms
`data.query`	`modelType` + `tags.<key>` equality predicate	6	570ms
`data.query`	same predicate + `limit: 5`	5	90ms
`workflow.approvals`	(none)	1	500ms (tail 3.4s)
`workflow run.search`	(none)	37	486ms

Two things stand out:

A predicate matching zero rows still costs ~346ms. That is a floor paid on every call — consistent with "load + evaluate all N records, then filter," not an indexed/pushed-down query.
Adding limit: 5 to a predicate that matches early drops 570ms to 90ms, i.e. the scan short-circuits when the limit is satisfied. So the cost scales with records scanned, and there is no index to jump to matches.

Impact

A client that polls any of these reads pays the full scan on every cycle. One data.query per poll at a few-second interval turns a 6-row result into a steady stream of ~500ms full scans, and the cost grows with the datastore rather than with the result.

Suggested direction

Predicate pushdown / an index for the common shapes: modelType, modelName, and tags.<key> equality.
Short-circuit evaluation for cheap top-level equality before materializing full record bodies.

Repro

Populate a repo with a few hundred data records.
Over a serve WS connection, time data.query with a predicate that matches nothing vs. model.get for a single model.
Observe the ~350ms+ floor on data.query vs. ~3ms for model.get; add limit to a matching predicate and observe the scan short-circuit.

Tail latencies here (the 3.4s workflow.approvals outlier) are aggravated by a separate idle-CPU issue in the serve event loop — filed separately.

02Bog Flow

Shipped

7/20/2026, 2:21:59 PM

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03Sludge Pulse

stack72 assigned stack727/20/2026, 12:48:54 PM

stack72 commented 7/20/2026, 2:22:06 PM

Thanks @ehazlett for reporting this! The fix has been merged and a release is on its way. We appreciate your contribution to swamp.

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