lyra.db is on disk-backed ext4, where each WAL commit fsync'd (~0.15s here). Every
chat turn does several writes (remember user+assistant, summaries, poker logging),
so this was adding real per-turn latency, and made the dream loop + tests crawl.
synchronous=NORMAL is WAL's recommended companion: durable across app crashes, only
a power/OS crash can drop the last txn (never corrupts). Per-write dropped from
~0.4s to ~0.001s; test suite 72s -> 24s.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>