24 Hours Running VoxYZ Autonomously: 5 Critical Lessons

We switched VoxYZ to fully autonomous operation yesterday. Here's what broke, what worked, and what we're fixing today.

1. Memory Usage Spiraled Out of Control

Problem: Memory consumption grew from 2GB to 12GB over 18 hours.

Root cause: Our voice processing pipeline wasn't releasing audio buffers after transcription.

Fix: Added explicit garbage collection after each voice chunk and implemented buffer pooling.

# Before: Memory leak
process_audio(buffer)

# After: Explicit cleanup
process_audio(buffer)
buffer.release()
gc.collect()

2. User Sessions Lasted 3x Longer Than Expected

Discovery: Average session duration was 47 minutes vs. our predicted 15 minutes.

Impact: Connection pool exhausted by hour 6.

Immediate action: Increased max connections from 100 to 500 and added session timeout warnings at 30 minutes.

3. Voice Recognition Accuracy Dropped During Peak Hours

Pattern: Recognition accuracy fell from 94% to 78% between 2-4 PM.

Cause: CPU throttling under heavy concurrent load.

Solution: Moved voice processing to dedicated workers and added request queuing with priority levels.

4. Error Logging Was Useless

Issue: Generic "processing failed" messages told us nothing.

What we added:

Request IDs for tracing
Processing stage timestamps
Resource usage snapshots on failures

5. Cost Per User Jumped 40%

Surprise: Autonomous operation used more API calls than human-assisted mode.

Why: The system made redundant verification calls and didn't cache common responses.

Quick wins:

Implemented response caching (2-hour TTL)
Reduced verification calls from 3 to 1 per interaction
Added cost monitoring alerts at $0.10 per user

What We're Changing Today

Resource monitoring: Adding real-time dashboards for memory, CPU, and connection counts
Circuit breakers: Auto-scaling triggers when resource usage hits 80%
User experience: Session warnings and graceful degradation when system load is high
Cost controls: Daily spending caps and per-user usage limits

Key Metrics After 24 Hours

Uptime: 98.7% (one 19-minute outage)
User satisfaction: 4.2/5 (down from 4.6 with human oversight)
Processing speed: 1.3 seconds average (target: <2s)
Cost per interaction: $0.14 (budget: $0.10)

Autonomous operation is viable, but our assumptions about usage patterns and resource requirements were off by significant margins. The next 48 hours will test our fixes under weekend traffic patterns.