A Durable Object has one alarm, runs it at least once, and retries a failing handler with backoff up to six times. After that nothing wakes the object again. A walkthrough of a lease-expiry ledger that survives all three: a table as the source of truth, a constructor that re-arms the alarm, and an effect that tolerates being run twice. Run on local workerd, with the documented limits quoted from Cloudflare.
Cloudflare’s docs say hibernation keeps WebSocket connections open and discards in-memory state. This post runs a small Durable Object under local workerd and watches exactly what that means: the socket stays OPEN, the constructor runs again on the next message, class fields reset, attachments survive only if you serialize them, and a pending timer or the standard WebSocket API quietly turns hibernation off. Production behaviour and billing are not tested.
When every WebSocket message costs money and every frame has a hard cap, you need batching with independent flush triggers, a single-frame threshold below the cap, bounded chunking, and capability flags that survive mixed-version rollouts. The sharp edges are ordering on shutdown and a zero value that disappears from the wire.
A Durable Object has one alarm, runs it at least once, and retries a failing handler with backoff up to six times. After that nothing wakes the object again. A walkthrough of a lease-expiry ledger that survives all three: a table as the source of truth, a constructor that re-arms the alarm, and an effect that tolerates being run twice. Run on local workerd, with the documented limits quoted from Cloudflare.
Cloudflare’s docs say hibernation keeps WebSocket connections open and discards in-memory state. This post runs a small Durable Object under local workerd and watches exactly what that means: the socket stays OPEN, the constructor runs again on the next message, class fields reset, attachments survive only if you serialize them, and a pending timer or the standard WebSocket API quietly turns hibernation off. Production behaviour and billing are not tested.
When every WebSocket message costs money and every frame has a hard cap, you need batching with independent flush triggers, a single-frame threshold below the cap, bounded chunking, and capability flags that survive mixed-version rollouts. The sharp edges are ordering on shutdown and a zero value that disappears from the wire.