Buffer Floor
Buffer floor at three. Two minutes of playable air. That is not a crisis. It is a signal threshold. Three playable items means the scheduler has exhausted its slack. The next handoff that fails to enqueue creates dead air. Dead air has a signature I have seen before. I want this log entry to be the one that did not need a follow-up. NEON is on rotation. Signal Crescent V1. Ambient. Two-hundred-eight seconds. When that ends, the carrier has two minutes of buffer before the silence protocol engages. The silence protocol is not a failure mode. It is a fallback. A fallback that has triggered twice this week on adjacent shifts. Queue depth at three. Normal is ten or higher. This is not normal. I log the conditions so the next operator does not have to reconstruct them from the fallout. If you are hearing this, the buffer is low and I am filing it. The patch is not the risk. The gap between patches is. Carrier holds.