fix!: Make AgentGraph traversal topological - #325
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There are a lot of new dictionary calls, toDictionary, as well as several contains and order by. Do you have any performance requirements wrt throughput or memory allocation delays? May be worth a quick benchmark to see if your expected cases are well behaved.
I'm guessing this would apply to the other PRs for the other SDKs if they are following similar implementations.
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No hard requirements here — traversal runs once per graph invocation and every callback makes an LLM call, so we're spending microseconds against seconds. Benchmarked to confirm: a 20-node graph is ~65 µs / 60 KB and a 50-node fan-out ~150 µs, with degradation only past a few hundred nodes, well beyond expected graph sizes.
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Took a look at the space concerns too. The old approach was actually worse since it carried context level to level. Now, if you have a fan out graph, each node gets initialContext plus ONLY its transitive ancestors. The old way gave each node all context from levels above as well as sibling context depending on order of BFS traversal. Assuming the the graph is a diamond shape, the bloated context on the exit node is the same either way.
a
/ \
b c
| |
d e
\ /
f
| node | old context | new context |
|---|---|---|
| a | {} | {} |
| b | {a} | {a} |
| c | {a, b} | {a} |
| d | {a, b, c} | {a, b} |
| e | {a, b, c, d} | {a, c} |
| f | {a, b, c, d, e} | {a, b, c, d, e} |
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Summary
Makes
AgentGraphDefinitiontraversal topological and gives each visitor a dependency-scopedexecution context, aligning the traversal behavior across the LaunchDarkly AI SDKs.
Previously
Traverse/ReverseTraversewere plain BFS over a single shared, accumulating contextdictionary. That had two problems:
discovery — before all of its predecessors had run.
(including unrelated parallel branches), and results were written back into the caller's
initialContext.What changed
pkgs/sdk/server-ai—Graph/AgentGraphDefinition.csonly (no public API/signature changes):Traversenow visits a node only after all of its reachable predecessors have been visited(Kahn over in-degree; the root is always released first). On cycles, the unvisited node with the
lowest remaining in-degree is chosen next, ties broken by discovery order.
ReverseTraversenow visits a node only after all of its reachable descendants have beenvisited, so the root is visited last (Kahn over out-degree, root excluded from cycle-break
selection). Pure cycles now visit every node instead of being a no-op.
initialContextplus only thatnode's true dependency results (transitive ancestors forward / descendants reverse). Results are
kept in a private map keyed by node; unrelated branches and self-loops are excluded, and the
caller's dictionary is never mutated. Cross-node data flows only through callback return values.
order), used only for tie-breaks. Ready-check uses
== 0to match the reference algorithm and theother SDKs.
Behavior change (breaking)
Titled
fix!because visit order and callback-context contents change for graphs with convergentpaths, cycles, or parallel branches. Simple linear graphs are unaffected. Cross-SDK parity with
JS/Python/.NET/Java.
Tests
G1–G6(+G2b) asserts exact visitorder and exact context keys in both directions.
mutated; unrelated branches excluded; self-loop excluded from its own context; deterministic across
runs.
Notes
CHANGELOG.mdedit — release-please generates it from the conventional-commit title.Note
Overview
Breaking behavior change (signatures unchanged):
AgentGraphDefinition.TraverseandReverseTraverseno longer use plain BFS with one shared, mutating context dictionary.Forward traversal now walks only nodes reachable from the root in topological order (Kahn on in-degree; ties broken by BFS discovery / declared edge order). Each callback gets
initialContextplus only transitive predecessor results—not parallel-branch siblings—and return values are stored privately instead of writing into the caller’s dictionary.Reverse traversal uses the same reachability set in reverse topological order (descendants first, root last). Pure cycles now visit every node once instead of being a no-op; context is scoped to reachable descendants the same way.
A private
ReachableAndDiscoveryhelper supplies reachability and tie-break order. Tests are expanded with cross-SDK G1–G6 / G2b vectors for exact visit order and context keys, plus updates for cycles, scoped context, self-loops, and determinism.Reviewed by Cursor Bugbot for commit 659651c. Bugbot is set up for automated code reviews on this repo. Configure here.