Background Work Registry

What it is

A read-only view of the work Omniscio does without being asked: timers that poll, watchers that react, helper processes that stay resident and jobs that run on a schedule. Each item carries the owner responsible for it, the file or script behind it, its current state, its measured cost, and a verdict against the cost budget its owner declared.

Where to find it

Settings → Help → Diagnostics → Background, on the tab beside Resources.

How it behaves

• The tab reads once when you open it, and again when you press Refresh. It never polls, so opening it can never add steady load to a machine that already feels slow.
• Rows are grouped by owner, so the answer to "who is responsible" is the section heading.
• A number is a real measurement of that item. "—" with "Not measured" means nothing times this item — it never means zero, and it is never treated as healthy.
• "No budget declared" means the owner never stated a limit, so there is nothing to compare against. That is a gap in the declaration, not a clean bill of health.
• The rule behind it: every background item is declared in one registry, and a new timer, daemon or scheduled job cannot be added without a declaration — the build fails instead. Work that predates the registry is adopted with a reason and a count, and that list can only shrink.

For agents

GET /diag/background on the local control server returns the same table as JSON. It is read-only, charged against the caller's read budget, and reachable with a session's own scoped token, so an agent answers "what is running and what is too expensive" from data instead of guessing.

Related

• Resources Diagnostic Panel — the raw per-process view this one attributes by owner.
• Slow computer — what to do when the machine, not the app, is the problem.