A single agent turn can fan out N vision_analyze calls at once — the
classic trigger is "analyze every frame of this video", where ffmpeg
explodes a clip into dozens of frames and the model calls vision_analyze
on each. Every call does a CPU-heavy base64-encode/resize burst AND holds
a long-lived LLM stream open. The tool executor runs concurrent tool calls
on a per-session ThreadPoolExecutor (_MAX_TOOL_WORKERS=8), and multiple
agent sessions share one process (the dashboard runs the agent in-process),
so there was no global ceiling. In prod (June 2026) a video-frame fan-out
pinned a worker thread at ~100% CPU and starved the shared asyncio event
loop that also serves the dashboard's /api/status liveness probe, flapping
the instance to UNHEALTHY even though nothing had crashed.
Add a process-global threading.BoundedSemaphore that bounds how many vision
analyses run concurrently across the whole process, held across the entire
analysis (image load + encode + LLM call) in the single _handle_vision_analyze
chokepoint (covers both the native fast path and the legacy aux-LLM path).
It is a threading semaphore, NOT asyncio: each vision call is dispatched
through model_tools._run_async on a per-thread event loop, so an asyncio
primitive bound to one loop cannot coordinate across them. The acquire is
offloaded via run_in_executor so waiting for a slot never blocks the calling
loop.
Default: min(host CPUs, 4), floored at 1 — respect the host's concurrency,
or lower. Override via auxiliary.vision.max_concurrency (config.yaml) or
HERMES_VISION_MAX_CONCURRENCY (env). Values < 1 are ignored so the cap can
never be disabled into an unbounded fan-out.
Tests: bounded-fan-out regression guard + a control proving it would fail
without the cap; resolver tests for host-cpu default, ceiling clamp, low-cpu
host, env override, and sub-1 rejection. Pre-existing handler tests updated
for the now-async _handle_vision_analyze. Verified via the real
registry.dispatch -> _run_async per-thread-loop path (16 concurrent calls,
peak bounded to cap).
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