perf: reuse session during converse matching

[goldyfruit]

Summary

• reuse the already-folded live Session throughout one converse matcher call
• avoid repeated deserialization, singleton-registry locking, and last-writer-wins refolds of the same message snapshot
• keep direct helper callers backward compatible while ensuring timeout filtering survives until skill polling

Architecture

This is an internal state-reuse refactor. It does not skip converse, reorder intent pipelines, change message topics, alter public protocol behavior, or add traffic-manipulation hooks. A message snapshot is folded into the canonical live Session once; every stage in that matcher invocation then uses that same object.

Besides the latency reduction, this preserves timeout filtering. Previously, a later SessionManager.get(message) could refold the original wire snapshot after an expired skill had been removed, restoring stale state before polling.

Canary evidence

The exact-source 32-process canary compared three 400-client runs before and after this head. Every run delivered 400/400 semantically verified skill replies; persona and LLM escalation were disabled.

Stable observations (discarding the first post-rollout noisy run from both versions):

Stage	Before	After	Change
converse prepare mean	49.7-50.3 ms	34.2-35.0 ms	about 31% lower
converse poll mean	102.6-107.8 ms	53.0-55.6 ms	about 49% lower
total converse mean	152.5-158.3 ms	87.4-90.7 ms	about 43% lower
skill selection mean	291-302 ms	238-245 ms	about 18% lower
end-to-end mean	1.54-1.58 s	1.49-1.51 s	about 4% lower
end-to-end p95	2.25-2.39 s	2.23-2.31 s	no regression

The canary image is composed only from explicit review heads, publishes SBOM/provenance, and verifies the single-fold source shape at build time.

Validation

• Ruff passes on the touched files
• 50 focused converse tests pass
• regression coverage asserts one fold per matcher call
• regression coverage asserts an expired skill is not restored before polling
• official Ovoscope end-to-end check passes
• all GitHub checks pass on Python 3.10 through 3.14
• git diff --check passes
• no CI files changed

A local all-in-one test process reported four order-dependent no-skill subtest failures after 360 passes; the same no-skill file passes in a clean process (2 tests and 4 subtests), and the official isolated Ovoscope job passes. This is retained here for transparent reproducibility rather than attributed to this change.

Summary by CodeRabbit

• Bug Fixes

  • Improved conversation handling for more consistent skill matching.
  • Prevented expired skills from being selected or triggering converse events.
  • Reduced unnecessary session loading during conversation processing.
  • Improved synchronization of active conversation state across requests.

• Tests

  • Added coverage for session reuse, expired-skill filtering, and compatibility with existing session formats.
  • Verified that expired skills are removed from conversation context before processing.

[coderabbitai]

No actionable comments were generated in the recent review. 🎉

ℹ️ Recent review info

⚙️ Run configuration

Configuration used: defaults

Review profile: CHILL

Plan: Pro Plus

Run ID: 188eb927-2e16-42d3-8f2d-5f49d53cd50d

📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between 9d35397 and 3c846f6.

📒 Files selected for processing (2)

• ovos_core/intent_services/converse_service.py
• test/unittests/test_converse_service.py

🚧 Files skipped from review as they are similar to previous changes (2)

• test/unittests/test_converse_service.py
• ovos_core/intent_services/converse_service.py

---

📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

Converse state now uses Session.active_handlers dictionaries. match reuses one loaded session for response-mode selection, timeout filtering, and converse-skill collection. Tests cover handler expiration and session lookup reuse.

Changes

Converse session reuse

Layer / File(s)	Summary
Active handler state ovos_core/intent_services/converse_service.py, test/unittests/test_converse_service.py	Active-skill access and timeout tests now use handler dictionaries with skill_id and activated_at fields. Compatibility tests cover tuple reads and lossless writes.
Session-aware converse helpers ovos_core/intent_services/converse_service.py	_collect_converse_skills and _check_converse_timeout accept an optional session and retain message-based lookup when no session is provided.
Match pipeline session reuse ovos_core/intent_services/converse_service.py, test/unittests/test_converse_service.py	match reuses its loaded session for response-mode skill selection, timeout filtering, and converse-skill collection. Tests verify one session lookup and expired-handler removal before polling.

Estimated code review effort: 2 (Simple) | ~10 minutes

Sequence Diagram(s)

sequenceDiagram
  participant Match
  participant Session
  participant TimeoutCheck
  participant SkillCollector
  participant ConverseBus
  Match->>Session: load session once
  Match->>TimeoutCheck: filter active handlers using session
  Match->>SkillCollector: collect converse skills using session
  SkillCollector->>ConverseBus: poll converse candidates

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🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 5

✅ Passed checks (5 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Description Check	✅ Passed	Check skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.
Title check	✅ Passed	The title clearly and concisely summarizes the main change: reusing the session during converse matching.
Docstring Coverage	✅ Passed	Docstring coverage is 85.71% which is sufficient. The required threshold is 80.00%.
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.

✨ Finishing Touches

🧪 Generate unit tests (beta)

• Create PR with unit tests

---

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[coderabbitai]

Actionable comments posted: 2

🤖 Prompt for all review comments with AI agents

Verify each finding against current code. Fix only still-valid issues, skip the
rest with a brief reason, keep changes minimal, and validate.

Inline comments:
In `@ovos_core/intent_services/converse_service.py`:
- Around line 348-352: Update the _check_converse_timeout call path so the
filtered live session is serialized back into message.context["session"] before
message.forward() emits converse pings. Ensure _handle_activate cannot re-fold
the original snapshot and restore expired handlers, while preserving the
existing filtering in session.active_handlers and downstream
_collect_converse_skills behavior.
- Around line 100-109: Update the active_skills property getter to return
immutable (skill_id, activated_at) tuples, and change its setter to rebuild
session.active_handlers directly from the supplied tuples without calling
Session.activate_skill. Preserve each original activated_at value and the input
ordering exactly.

🪄 Autofix

Fix all unresolved CodeRabbit comments on this PR:

• Push a commit to this branch (recommended)
• Create a new PR with the fixes

---

ℹ️ Review info

⚙️ Run configuration

Configuration used: defaults

Review profile: CHILL

Plan: Pro Plus

Run ID: adc95211-cb01-47ab-a4c7-d36602841fa1

📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between 005ab65 and 9d35397.

📒 Files selected for processing (2)

• ovos_core/intent_services/converse_service.py
• test/unittests/test_converse_service.py

🚧 Files skipped from review as they are similar to previous changes (1)

• test/unittests/test_converse_service.py