@evoskuil alright alright, gotta eat humble pie. after reading your explanation carefully and reading the code, i agree that a later batch can recover a link that was placed after its rows were purged. so this was not a stall, and was instead libbitcoin and ZFS fighting for memory. i also had a leftover watchdog on the box that would kill the service using a lot of memory (this was a leftover from when i was running fulcrum and frigate on the server and didnt want things to get locked up)