Investigate: Confirm transaction conflicts are log verbosity only

[lfnovo]

Context

This issue is tracked in the SurrealDB umbrella issue #372.

Problem

SurrealDB transaction conflicts appear frequently in logs under concurrent load. We need to confirm whether these are:

1. Just log verbosity — The retry mechanism (Tenacity) handles them and operations succeed
2. Real failures — Some operations are actually failing despite retries

Current State

• We use Tenacity for automatic retries in surreal-commands
• Transaction conflicts show up in logs but we haven't systematically verified outcomes
• User-facing impact is unclear

Investigation Tasks

• Add instrumentation to track retry counts vs final success/failure
• Run load test with concurrent operations
• Analyze logs to categorize conflict outcomes
• Document findings with metrics

Expected Outcome

A clear answer with data:

• "X% of conflicts resolve after retry, Y% fail permanently"
• If mostly log noise → document and consider log level adjustment
• If real failures → create follow-up issue for fixes

Related

• [Bug]: SurrealDB cannot commit transactions (read or write conflict) #362 — Transaction conflicts (read/write conflicts under load)
• [Umbrella] SurrealDB: Architecture Decision & Known Challenges #372 — [Umbrella] SurrealDB Architecture Decision

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🏷️ Part of SurrealDB infrastructure work

[lfnovo]

Confirmed