Durable work needs storage

A running server and a recovery record solve different problems. Choose what must survive termination and how the next worker finds it.

Remember from chapters 8 and 9 that processes lose their state on termination.

Source: Q0233; B233, B333.

Failure it prevents

The service26 restarts successfully while accepted work disappears.

Our Effect 4.0.0 reading

Workflow, Activity, and WorkflowEngine describe resumable work. Choose persistent engine storage. WorkflowEngine.layerMemory keeps state only in memory.

Source: packages/effect/src/workflow/Workflow.ts, packages/effect/src/workflow/Activity.ts, packages/effect/src/workflow/WorkflowEngine.ts.

How to check

Kill the worker after acceptance. Recover the same operation identity from the selected backend. This check is our proposal. The books do not prescribe it.

Continue with Every task needs an owner9, Checkpoints follow the promised commit10.

Connect this to the existing rat-stack guidance23.

Use the durability skill for the full review. Return to the durability index34.

Sources

  1. Jurić, Saša. Elixir in Action, Third Edition. Manning, 2024.. Manning. §5.4.3 Shared-Nothing Concurrency; Chapters 8–9, fault tolerance and supervision; Other Use Cases for ETS. Accessed 2026-10-23.
  2. Gray II, James Edward; Tate, Bruce A. Designing Elixir Systems with OTP. Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2019.. Pragmatic Bookshelf. Build a Functional Core; Isolate Process Machinery in a Boundary; Customize Your Lifecycle; Big, Loud Worker-Bees; Add Persistence as a Boundary Service; Test the Boundary. Accessed 2026-10-23.
  3. Effect contributors. Effect 4.0.0. workflow/Workflow.ts. Effect-TS. Pinned source for our Effect mapping, not a claim from the book. Accessed 2026-10-23.
  4. Effect contributors. Effect 4.0.0. workflow/Activity.ts. Effect-TS. Pinned source for our Effect mapping, not a claim from the book. Accessed 2026-10-23.
  5. Effect contributors. Effect 4.0.0. workflow/WorkflowEngine.ts. Effect-TS. Pinned source for our Effect mapping, not a claim from the book. Accessed 2026-10-23.

Last changed 2026-10-23 in 58dc623. Source on GitHub. Change log.

Linked from

  1. Agent guide. An Effect stack so pure (aspirational) Kit Langton will blush.

    Durable work needs storage — A restarted worker cannot recover intent that existed only in memory.

  2. Change log. What changed in the files served here, newest first.

    Durable work needs storage — new page: docs(lore): land the durability wiki pages and bibliography

  3. durability. Keep a rat-stack app standing when a provider, pool, or dependency slows down or a worker dies. Use at any I/O boundary, connection pool, provider call, shared waiter, fan-out, flag, gate, or work that can outlive a request, or when asked "what happens when this is slow", "add a timeout", "make this durable", or "what survives a crash".

    Durability lives in storage.

  4. Durability. Seven durable Effect patterns, each with its seam, its fence, and the incident that taught it.

    Durability here means four things:¶

  5. Durability bibliography. Books, checked short quotations, source limits, and Effect mapping provenance.

    Quote numbers match the links on the durability pages.¶

  6. Durability starts with a recovery record. A reading order for storage, replay, worker ownership, overload, and recovery tests.

    Durable work needs storage: A restarted worker cannot recover intent that existed only in memory.¶

  7. Durable timers need recovery. Persist scheduled intent when losing a worker must not lose its deadlines.

    Continue with Durable work needs storage, Restart must reconstruct known state.¶

  8. Effect + Alchemy peers. Public repositories that share rat-stack's prerelease lines.

    Why this tier: XState 6 pure transitions inside persisted Rivet actors are a relevant durability seam; not yet studied.

  9. Effect is not BEAM. Fibers share a runtime; scope ownership does not supply isolated heaps or OTP restart strategies.

    Continue with Supervision chooses what restarts, Durable work needs storage.¶

  10. Every task needs an owner. Give child work a lifetime, a failure observer, and a recovery decision.

    Continue with Supervision chooses what restarts, Durable work needs storage.¶

  11. Full agent guide. An Effect stack so pure (aspirational) Kit Langton will blush.
  12. Rat Stack lore | rat-stack. Short, source-grounded notes on the ideas and decisions behind rat-stack.

    Durable work needs storage — A restarted worker cannot recover intent that existed only in memory.

  13. rat-stack-mode. Route non-trivial rat-stack code, data, design, investigation, and documentation tasks to every matching playbook and principle.

    Durability¶

  14. Source change history (log.md). The generated change log as Markdown.

    Durable work needs storage — new page: docs(lore): land the durability wiki pages and bibliography