Problem

Relay pods go deaf and die with exit 137 (liveness kills — up to 41/day fleet-wide). Root-caused by local reproduction at the deployed SHA: the tracing fmt layer writes JSON logs synchronously to stdout. In Kubernetes, stdout is a pipe drained by containerd's log copier. When the copier stalls (node disk-IO pressure, log rotation), the ~64KB pipe fills, the next write(2) blocks while holding Rust's global stdout lock, and every Tokio worker that logs queues behind it. The whole runtime parks in ~8s: liveness probes time out, SIGTERM (an async task) can never run, kubelet waits the full 60s grace and SIGKILLs.

Worker-thread count does not help — measured identical time-to-deaf at 2 and 8 workers (stdout is one global mutex, logging is on every hot path).

Repro evidence: RESEARCH/RELAY_STALL_LOCAL_REPRO_2026_07_27.md (Eva's nest) — SIGSTOP-the-consumer reproduces the full prod signature on demand, thread dumps show workers wedged in Stdout::write_all → write(2).

Fix

Route stdout through tracing_appender::non_blocking in lossy mode: the only blocking syscall moves to one dedicated OS thread behind a bounded queue. A stalled copier now costs dropped log lines, never a wedged runtime. Design reviewed and independently converged on by Wren (buzz-development thread).

• logging::non_blocking_stdout() — explicit lossy(true) + buffered_lines_limit(4096). Limit is byte-budget-derived from measured prod line sizes (bb-block fleet sample, 26k lines: p50=248B, largest observed 641B — note p99 = max in that sample, so the true tail may be slightly larger; the byte budget has ample headroom either way): 4096 × 641B ≈ 2.6MB worst-case queue memory against a 2Gi limit. The buffer absorbs bursts; it is deliberately not sized to ride out a sustained copier outage.
• logging::spawn_drop_counter_poller() — polls the writer's cumulative ErrorCounter and emits deltas into the monotonic counter buzz_log_lines_dropped_total (counter, not gauge; never logs — the log channel is exactly what has failed when it fires). Any positive rate = a copier stall that would previously have killed the pod, so this doubles as a permanent detector.
• logging::BoundedWorkerGuard (added in review, e1a810371) — wraps the upstream WorkerGuard so that guard drop is bounded even when stdout is wedged. Review finding (Dawn reproduced it standalone; Max flagged the same path from source): upstream WorkerGuard::drop, when the queue is full, times out its 100ms shutdown send and then println!s — into the exact stdout whose lock the worker holds while parked in write(2). That deadlocks shutdown in precisely the failure mode this PR fixes. The wrapper runs the upstream drop on a sacrificial named thread and waits ≤2s (upstream's healthy drop is internally bounded at ~1.1s): healthy shutdown keeps the full flush; a wedged pipe costs the queued lines (already this module's stated loss policy) and process exit reaps the abandoned thread. If thread spawn fails, the guard is leaked, never dropped inline — lost lines, never a hang.
• Guard held as a named _log_guard through all of main (binding to bare _ drops it immediately and silently discards all logs — documented + tested).
• Whole-line atomicity comes free: fmt hands the writer a complete serialized line and admission is a single try_send, so no partial/corrupt JSON lines ever reach the pipe.

Direct-write audit: all 12 eprintln! sites in buzz-relay are inside #[cfg(test)] modules; no prod-reachable println!/eprintln! bypasses the writer.

Verification

Unit tests (6 in logging.rs): blocked-sink invariant (blocked writer + queue over capacity leaves the runtime responsive, memory bounded, drops counted, output recovers on unblock), end-to-end delivery, drop-counter delta semantics, oversized-line whole-line atomicity, bounded-guard healthy-path flush, and a subprocess-level wedged-shutdown regression: the test re-execs itself with stdout piped and never read, saturates pipe + queue (proven via dropped_lines() > 0, reported over stderr since stdout can't carry a readiness signal once wedged), drops the guard, and asserts clean bounded exit. Verified the test catches the bug: with the raw upstream drop inlined, the child hangs and the test fails on its deadline.

Live repro at b03bf2d8b (release build, 2 tokio workers, stdout piped to a SIGSTOP-able consumer — the rig that reproduced the prod failure):

⚠️ An earlier revision of this table claimed "graceful drain, clean exit in 5.1s with the consumer still SIGSTOPped" for SIGTERM-during-stall. That claim was wrong for the queue-full case: Dawn's standalone repro shows upstream guard drop hanging indefinitely when the queue is saturated (that run must not have had a full queue at SIGTERM time). e1a810371 fixes the deadlock; a fresh live E2E at the new head — including SIGTERM while buzz_log_lines_dropped_total is actively incrementing — is being run before merge (Perci).

Full relay suite at e1a810371: 771 passed, 1 failed — api::mesh_demo::tests::demo_join_forwarded_arm_round_trips_echo, verified pre-existing on clean be13b4bb9 (main). fmt + clippy clean.

Follow-ups (separate PRs):

• buzz-push-gateway still uses a plain blocking tracing_subscriber::fmt().json().init() (crates/buzz-push-gateway/src/main.rs:22) and is deployed with a liveness probe — same failure class (Dawn's review finding). Tracked so it isn't a discovery during the next incident.
• pack_cache sync remove_dir_all → spawn_blocking.