Saturday morning, the storage queues were falling and the trackers were pushing about 4.8 gigabits per second.
By late Sunday, all of the queues appeared to be processed.
That gave us room to become more aggressive about marking old or unhealthy devices dead, a couple at a time, and watching how the system responded. We could make the next decision together Monday instead of turning a good weekend into an uncontrolled cleanup sprint.
Storage systems accumulate history. Devices remain in service because replacing them carries risk. Replicas sit at different counts. A queue develops because moving data competes with everything else the system is doing. Over time, the safe-looking choice can become leaving too much fragile hardware in the path.
Clearing the queues changed the balance. The system was no longer spending its energy catching up. We could remove devices deliberately and let replication return the data to the desired state.
I also wanted to run the data process that would show whether any files were still sitting with only one or two copies. “Queue empty” is useful, but it is not the same as “every object has the right durability.” The next check had to look at the outcome, not only the work list.
Then there was Texas. If the current environment was healthy, the next storage location needed attention.
The tone of my email was excited: things looked great, push harder, and see how the system handled it. That energy was real. It also sat inside a measured sequence. A few devices, then a check. A data run, then a decision. One location, then the next.
This was the same storage program that had filled much of 2013: replication workers, new data nodes, load balancing, and traffic control. The progress arrived gradually enough that a processed queue felt like a genuine milestone.
There would be more storage work on Monday. For the weekend, the important line was simple: everything waiting in the queues had moved.