Files
hermes-agent/tools
Teknium 6bd43111d1 perf(terminal): adaptive subprocess poll cuts ~195ms off every tool call (#29006)
`_wait_for_process()` was sleeping for a fixed 200ms between polls of
the subprocess exit status. For commands that complete in <50ms (echo,
pwd, date, cat short files, write_file with small content, read_file
with small content), the agent was stuck waiting for the next 200ms
tick to notice the process had exited. That floor was the dominant
component of per-tool latency for typical short commands.

Replace with adaptive backoff: start at 5ms, multiply by 1.5 each
iteration up to 200ms. Fast commands (the common case) return in
~6ms; long-running commands (builds, tests, sleeps) reach the 200ms
steady-state poll rate within ~12 iterations (~150ms total) and pay
identical CPU after that.

Tool-call wall time (deterministic microbench of `echo first`):
  before: median 200ms min 200ms max 200ms
  after:  median   5ms min   5ms max   7ms
  saved:  ~195ms per terminal tool call

End-to-end chat -q with 3 sequential terminal tool calls
(`echo first`, `echo second`, `echo third`):
  before: median 5.73s, min 5.61s
  after:  median 4.64s, min 4.60s
  saved:  ~1100ms wall per turn

Live tmux session: a typical 'write file, read it back' turn now
displays each tool as 0.1s in the spinner (was 0.9s before). The
agent observes the subprocess exit ~200ms faster per call. For chat
workflows that do 4-8 terminal/file calls per turn this saves
800ms-1.5s of pure wall-clock waiting.

Why it's safe:
- Interrupt and timeout checks still fire on every iteration (no
  longer rate-limited to 5/sec)
- Activity callback fires on the same 'due' schedule (`touch_activity_if_due`)
- DEBUG_INTERRUPT heartbeat is unchanged (30s)
- Steady-state poll rate for long-running commands matches the old
  200ms within ~150ms of startup

Tests:
- tests/tools/ — 5246 passed, 22 skipped, 2 pre-existing xdist flakes
  (test_delegate.py::test_depth_limit, test_constants — pass in isolation)
- Live tmux: 2-turn conversation + multiple tool calls, no errors
2026-05-19 20:02:52 -07:00
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