Description

In our dogfood environment, the “Write Coder on Coder” template has prebuilds enabled for certain presets. We recently introduced new metrics for prebuild creation time (building into the pool) and prebuild claim time coder/coder#19503, and added them to our observability stack.

These metrics show that claim durations sometimes exceed creation by about 1–2 seconds. Because prebuilds maintain a ready-to-use pool to reduce workspace start time, claims should be consistently faster than creations.

We already use a Terraform lifecycle block with ignore_changes as recommended in the docs, yet this pattern suggests Terraform may still be replacing or re-provisioning resources during claim, or the claim path is performing extra work.

For reference, see the attached screenshot comparing average build times for a prebuild creation versus a claim on the Falkenstein preset in our dogfood instance.

Investigation scope

Investigate the source of the additional claim-path latency relative to the create path.