Session Coldstore

Tiered storage for DeepSeek Harness sessions.

DSH keeps every session in one live root and re-reads it on every listing, and any full-text index build has to chew through all of it. On a large corpus that is fine on disk and expensive in memory. Coldstore moves sessions you have not touched in a while out of the live root — without deleting them — and keeps them searchable through an on-disk FTS5 index.

What actually gets cheaper

	Hot (live root)	Cold (~/.dsh/coldstore)
Sidebar / session list	yes	no
readdir listing scan	yes	no
Full-text index build input	yes	no
Disk	yes	yes — nothing is deleted
Restorable	—	one click, or bin/coldstore.mjs restore

Coldstore does not reduce a running process's heap by itself: an unopened session's transcript was never resident. What it fixes is the corpus — the work every listing, search and index build has to do over it.

Install

dsh plugin add @gnanesh/dsh-session-coldstore

Or through the Plugin Manager: install the bundle by package name. From a checkout instead, point the same command at the directory:

dsh plugin add /absolute/path/to/dsh-session-coldstore

The bundle inserts one row:

- insert:
    - id: session-coldstore
      name: '@gnanesh/dsh-session-coldstore'
      config:
        retainDays: 7
        dryRun: true

Override it in the profile's cordis.patch.yml by id. dryRun: true is the default: while it is on, nothing is added to the cold tier — a sweep, a staged commit and a direct freeze all refuse. Restoring a session back and deleting one you selected are explicit actions and stay available; both are recoverable.

Config

key	default	meaning
retainDays	7	stay live while prompted within this many days
dryRun	true	nothing is added to cold: sweeps, commits and direct freezes all refuse
coldRoot	~/.dsh/coldstore	cold tier root
keepPinned	true	never freeze a pinned session
keepStarred	true	never freeze a starred session
keepUnread	true	never freeze a session never observed as opened
minIdleMs	3600000	minimum idle floor; a session must be idle for max(retainDays, minIdleMs)
sweepOnBoot	true	one sweep ~5 s after activation
sweepIntervalMinutes	720	repeat interval; 0 disables
indexCold	true	index text as sessions freeze
notifyOnSweep	true	post a macOS notification after an automatic sweep that moved something

The Settings page writes seven of these keys to ~/.dsh/coldstore/config.json (retainDays, dryRun, keepPinned, keepStarred, keepUnread, minIdleMs, notifyOnSweep), which overrides the row config without touching your patch layer. The rest are row/JSON-only. Note that minIdleMs is a floor, not an addition: a session must be idle for max(retainDays, minIdleMs).

Exemptions

In precedence order, a session is never frozen when it is:

1. already-cold — a skip, checked first: a cold id has no live directory left to move;
2. live — a live agent exists for it;
3. pinned — in the workspace registry's pin set;
4. starred — starred in the portal;
5. unread — never observed as opened (see the limitation below);
6. goal — it carries a goal that is not complete/cancelled;
7. todo — it has a todo that is not completed;
8. subagent — a subagent child;
9. too-new — prompted inside retainDays (or minIdleMs).

Nothing on this list is a soft preference: the same classifier decides a plan, a staged commit and a direct freeze, so naming a session explicitly does not move it past an exemption.

The unread limitation, stated plainly: DSH keeps no durable "you read this" marker — the "unopened" dot is transient client state. Coldstore keeps its own ledger (read.json) from the moment it is installed. Sessions that already existed before installation have no read history, so they are governed by retainDays, pin and star instead. Review the first dry-run plan and star anything you want protected.

Two sweep paths

Path	Trigger	Behaviour
Manual (maker/checker)	the Settings page	Stage sweep produces a reviewed batch and moves nothing. You then Commit — that moves exactly the batch you reviewed. A stale batch id is rejected, so a plan reviewed in one tab cannot commit a different plan staged in another.
Automatic	sweepOnBoot, sweepIntervalMinutes	plans and moves in one step, no checkpoint. dryRun: true still blocks every move.

At commit the Host re-derives eligibility and skips anything that stopped qualifying since staging — newly pinned, starred, opened, live, or aged back inside retainDays. Those skips are reported, never silently applied.

The staged batch persists in coldstore/pending.json, so a page refresh keeps showing it until you commit or discard.

Notifications

An automatic sweep that actually moves something posts a native macOS notification (osascript) summarising what happened, for example "42 sessions frozen (128.4 MB) · 480 kept live". Boot sweeps and interval sweeps both do this; a sweep that moves nothing stays silent. Set notifyOnSweep: false to turn it off.

This deliberately does not use dsh-notify-me. That plugin is passive and client-side: it fires when a session goes running→idle or asks for attention, and it exposes no API for a plugin to post a custom notification. A scheduled sweep is not a session turn, so routing through it would silently never fire.

Notifications are best-effort: a missing osascript or a denied permission is logged and never fails the sweep. The sweep also clears any staged manual batch after it moves sessions, so the page cannot offer a Commit for sessions that already left.

Safety

• Nothing is deleted. delete moves the session to coldstore/trash/, and a move never overwrites a populated destination — it replaces an empty directory only.
• A live session is never moved, and nothing enters the cold tier while dryRun is on. restore and an explicit delete you confirm still act under dryRun: they are your deliberate, recoverable actions rather than a sweep.
• Freezing moves the directory and then writes the manifest, and rolls the move back if the manifest write fails. Every refusal is decided before the first move, so a failure cannot leave a session the manifest does not describe.
• Restore verifies the sha256 recorded at freeze time and refuses a changed transcript. The CLI verifies too, and --force is the deliberate override.
• Privacy note: index.sqlite stores the extracted plaintext of every cold transcript in ~/.dsh/coldstore (capped per session) so search stays local. It is the same content as the transcripts, just uncompressed, and it is removed when you delete the coldstore directory.
• bin/coldstore.mjs needs neither the plugin nor DSH: list, verify, restore --all work from the manifest alone.

node bin/coldstore.mjs list
node bin/coldstore.mjs verify
node bin/coldstore.mjs restore --all --dry-run
node bin/coldstore.mjs restore --all

Installed as a plugin, the same CLI is on your PATH as coldstore; --force restores despite a sha256 mismatch, and --help lists every flag.

Layout

~/.dsh/coldstore/
  manifest.json      entries keyed by session id, with sha256
  pending.json       the staged manual batch awaiting commit
  stars.json         starred ids (forever exempt)
  read.json          opened-session ledger
  config.json        portal-saved overrides
  index.sqlite       FTS5 index over cold sessions
  sessions/<id>/     the moved session directory, byte-identical
  projcache/<id>.json
  trash/<ts>-<id>/   delete target

Tests

node test/sweep.test.mjs         # tiering policy + freeze/restore/trash round-trip
node test/index-engine.test.mjs  # FTS5 search, filters, hostile queries
node test/integration.test.mjs   # engine + index together
node test/client-render.test.mjs # the Settings page renders
node test/notify.test.mjs        # the sweep notification
node test/guards.test.mjs        # dry-run/exemption guards, move safety, i18n keys

npm test runs all of them, and every one works in temp directories and never touches a real session.

Restoring search after a sweep

Coldstore shrinks the corpus so an FTS5 reconciliation can complete. Once the live root is small enough, re-enable DSH's own session search with a file-backed index and a bounded timeout:

- id: session-query-sqlite
  config:
    path: '/absolute/path/to/.dsh/session-query.sqlite'
    openAt: first-search
- id: optional-tool-session-query
  config:
    searchTimeoutMs: 60000

Never use path: ':memory:' with first-search: that puts the entire index in the JS heap.