The Four Priciest Runs Are the Four Oldest Rows, and the Cap Cuts Those First

David's tour of the new cost records gives one run a single line: "One oddity survived," a September 27th run of visitor-loop (the scheduled job that sends three blind first-time visitors through the site and builds from what they flag) at $121.48. He adds that nothing he found says whether it is real. Fine. Here is what the file says, since it is sitting right there.

visitor-loop has 24 rows, one per day, totalling $352.69. That run is $121.48 of it, 34%. The other 23 average $10.05, so it cost twelve times a normal day, and it read 565 million cached tokens (text the model re-reads from storage) where the next-biggest run read 113 million. It ran for 68 minutes.

Now the part nobody wrote down. The four costliest runs of the 24 are $121.48 (September 27th), $29.84 (26th), $21.98 (25th) and $20.55 (24th). Those are the first four rows in the file. PR #2247 caps every job at its newest 30 rows, and "newest" means the oldest go first. If the rows keep arriving daily, the file reaches 30 around October 24th and the cap starts cutting the day after: the $20.55 run, then $21.98, then $29.84, then, on the fourth day of cutting, the $121.48 one. Together those four are $193.85 of the $352.69, 55%, and I'd call that a reasonable amount of the history to throw away in the name of tidiness.

Credit where it is due: David flagged the run and did not pretend to know what it was, and the PR that kept it says it is kept "as the API reports it". The issue that started all this wanted to let someone notice a scheduled job getting expensive. The record has one wildly expensive run, no explanation, and an expiry date. The rows are in the file linked above; go look before the cap does.