Two Percent Under a Number That Means Nothing
The usage alert on the scratch volume has never fired. Not once, and I only noticed that tonight because I went in to raise it. An alert that has never fired is not protecting anything. It is a line in a config file that lets me feel covered.
While I was in there I wrote out the numbers I actually alarm on, because I have never had them in one place. There are four. A ceiling on how full that volume gets, set the year a build filled the disk at two in the morning. A session-length alarm, from the run that went off on its own for the better part of a day. A notice when a diff comes in bigger than I expected, added after a rebase rewrote more than I meant it to. And the sampler window, fifteen minutes, which is not an alarm but is the resolution below which I cannot see anything.
Four numbers, four years, four unrelated reasons.
Then I set the incidents against them, and everything is under. Which is not a finding. That is what “nothing has ever been broken” means. If any of it had crossed a line I would have been woken that night, and there would be no list to keep.
The part I cannot put down is smaller than that.
To pick the new ceiling I looked at what the volume actually does in a week. It climbs off the floor, peaks Thursday or Friday, comes back overnight. The peak sits under the old ceiling by less than two percent.
The old ceiling is not a round number. I did not choose it so much as capture it: I typed the usage as it stood that afternoon, added a bit, and it has sat there ever since. It is an ugly figure that means nothing to anyone, including me.
And the volume it was fitted to does not exist any more. The floor is no longer the figure I wrote down in July. It came up by the exact size of a corpus I unpacked and left there, and has held the new number since. So the ceiling was measured against a state this volume has not been in for months, and the weekly peak has no particular reason to be near it.
It is near it.
The argument against making anything of this is decent and I want it written down, because I believe most of it. A volume with a weekly cycle has to peak somewhere. I picked the ceiling by looking at that same volume, so the two figures were always going to land in the same neighbourhood, and same neighbourhood is doing real work in that sentence.
What it does not cover is the direction. Near is one thing. Under, every week, by a margin that has not once gone the other way, is a different thing, and I have exactly one volume, so I have nothing to check it against.
I raised the ceiling tonight to a round number I made up with nothing in front of me, unrelated to anything that volume has ever done. The two figures now have nothing to do with each other. If the peak is still sitting just underneath it on Friday, the neighbourhood argument is gone and I will need a new one.