The first real boot gave the chance to measure what warming actually buys, and
the trial's numbers were wrong:
- Empty registry, register only, then time: the FIRST synthesis of a freshly
registered voice cost 1 883 ms; the next two 1 283 and 1 226 ms. A ~110-word
request cost 9.4 s and then 9.8 s.
- So the published 6.2–8.0 s cold / first-audio-byte 5 530 ms / later-requests
0.5 ms ladder does not reproduce, and request time tracks the audio generated
rather than snapshot state. The 0.5 ms figure is an internal state-restore
cost, never an end-to-end request time.
- Warming still earns its place for a different reason than the page claimed:
the registry is memory-only and re-registering does not warm, so a boot without
the hook leaves the façade answering 400 for every name. The saving is ~0.6 s.
Law 1 of [[Frank TTS Engine]] is re-titled the registry law and carries the
measured numbers; its example journal line is a real one from today; the
troubleshooting row for "first request of the day is slow" — the retired law's
symptom — is replaced by the argument-cap fault that actually happened. The same
ladder in the research brief is annotated rather than erased, and [[Voice Packs]]
step 6 stops claiming the hook registers only packs it has not seen (the engine
replaces a name it already holds).
Three pages, all from faults found this session:
- `LLM/deployment.md` gains "Locally built images": which images have no
registry digest, what the `cfhash` skip is for, why it must cover every COPY'd
file (the silent shape: build skipped, /health green, old code serving), and
the base-image half of the law — the engine's `useradd`, because the pinned
ubuntu:24.04 has no `adduser`.
- `Dankclaw/Frank TTS Engine.md` troubleshooting gains the two lines an operator
actually needs: every voice cold on a fresh boot with a hand-run hook
succeeding (= `WARM_TEXT` arrived quoted, `podman exec … env | grep WARM_TEXT`
proves it), and a 502 from the façade beside a 200 `/health` from the engine
(model loaded ≠ voices registered). The stale-warmer row is re-keyed to the
new rebuild rule.
- `Dankclaw/Voice Packs.md` step 4 was wrong: it told the next agent to restart
the engine *instead of* the warm hook because the hook "only registers packs it
has not seen". It registers every pack on every run and the engine replaces a
name it already holds — `tools/tts-server.cpp:148` at the pinned commit:
"Re-registering a name replaces the previous entry." A restart is what an
engine bump needs (the registry is memory-only), never worse, only slower.
- `Dankclaw/Frank TTS.md` deploy command re-keyed to `./scripts/deploy.sh
dankclaw --service frank-tts`, the way it is actually deployed; the raw
`deploy-remote.sh` form is plumbing.
The page a new operator needs: what the three required files are and who
reads each one, how a pack is built (with the extractor's usage text
verbatim, because the flags are not guessable and there is no -o), the
10-second gate and where it fires twice, how to add a fourth voice
including the warm hook that registers a pack without restarting the
engine, and the engine-bump procedure for when the artifact sizes move.
Plus the host census as of 2026-10-18 — the trial packs carry no
artifacts and their manifest is the trial's own schema, so the builder's
first real run is a --force migration — and the three gaps left open on
purpose: no curated ICL transcript, no 16 kHz variant, no loudness pass.
Linked from the Dankclaw services list; log entry appended oldest-first.
Frank