[egil]

Summary

Background posts and matching reminders received while dispatch or acknowledgement owns the outbox now preserve one follow-up request. Newly committed work dispatches promptly after acknowledgement instead of waiting for RetryDelay. Repeated requests coalesce; an explicit request can retry the whole pending snapshot once, while ordinary failures retain retry cadence.

 background request during delivery/acknowledgement
- change timer only; acknowledgement can overwrite it with RetryDelay
+ retain request until a fresh snapshot consumes it
 acknowledgement completes
+ schedule requested drain immediately

Queued acknowledgement callbacks whose batch was already consumed by a foreground post now leave the follow-up timer alone. Public interfaces, storage formats, reminder policies, and the separate acknowledgement turn are unchanged.

Evidence

• Before: the gated regression on the unmodified processor timed out waiting five seconds for B with a two-minute retry delay. Reversing only the stale-acknowledgement guard also made the foreground follow-up test time out waiting for C.
• After: all seven new hosted scenarios and all 988 Messaging solution tests pass in Release. The tests use real Orleans timers, with gates at the timer boundary to force the problematic ordering; they cover background/reminder triggers, coalescing, no duplicate successful delivery, failure retry cadence, and foreground takeover.
• Release CI build: 0 warnings, 0 errors. All four packages pack successfully and pass the existing NuGet validation rules, including SourceLink.
• Independent review of final commit 7cca9ce5: Standards: no actionable findings. Spec: no findings. All GitHub checks pass. An existing Journaling fault-injection test failed on the first CI run and passed on rerun; the outbox suite passed both runs.
• Stable candidate: NBGV produces 1.1.4 from v1.1.3 plus this fix. All 988 tests pass at patch commit 2c6ab7f4; its Release build has zero warnings/errors and all four packages validate. The core DLL extracted from Egil.Orleans.Messaging.1.1.4.nupkg also passes all seven new hosted regressions.

Merge Danger

Door: two-way

The change can be reverted without a storage migration.

Blast Radius: Outbox

Explicit requests during a failed batch permit one prompt retry of the pending snapshot. Without a further request, remaining failures wait for the configured retry delay.

Exceptional exits (processing timeout, cancellation, or throwing acknowledgement callback) preserve recovery at RetryDelay, as specified in the approved plan. They retain the request flag until the next retry takes a fresh snapshot; they do not schedule an immediate exceptional retry.

Refs #290.

Release handoff

The reviewed fix is backported to egil/om-290-1.1-patch, commit 2c6ab7f453017f13f1ae5cf5c96db2b51578c6eb. The local release/egil-orleans-messaging/v1.1 branch points at that commit. Its only difference from this PR's head is the stable version file.

Maintainer merge and publication remain pending. Publishing that commit to release/egil-orleans-messaging/v1.1 invokes the existing build/test/package-validation/release workflow and publishes stable 1.1.4 packages (Journaling remains 1.1.4-preview). The publishing branch has not been pushed. After publication, verify the NuGet package's source commit and regression behavior, then record the published version in #290.

[claude]

Code review

No issues found. Checked for bugs and CLAUDE.md compliance.

[Copilot]

🟡 Changes recommended

Exceptional dispatch and acknowledgement paths still overwrite explicit follow-up requests with the retry delay.

1 open finding

• Honor pending drain requests after exceptional dispatch exits · New

What changed in this PR

Updates outbox draining so background requests made during delivery or acknowledgement trigger a prompt follow-up dispatch.

Changes:

• Tracks coalesced follow-up drain requests.
• Preserves timers during stale acknowledgements.
• Adds hosted regression coverage and timer controls.

File	Description
OutboxProcessor.cs	Tracks and schedules requested follow-up drains.
OutboxProcessorDrainRequestTests.cs	Covers delivery, acknowledgement, retries, and foreground takeover.
OutboxDrainRequestGrain.cs	Provides the regression-test grain and synchronization gates.
GatedOutboxTimerRegistry.cs	Adds controllable Orleans timer decoration.
MessagingTestClusterFixture.cs	Installs the timer decorator.

🧠 Review effort: Balanced

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