Background

`sandbox:storage:global:expiration` is a single global ZSET shared by every
sandbox across all teams. The evictor calls `ExpiredItems` every 50 ms
(`pollInterval`), which issues a `ZRANGEBYSCORE` against this key on every tick.

Problem

There are currently no metrics to observe:

1. ZSET cardinality over time — no way to know whether
   `sandbox:storage:global:expiration` is growing unboundedly, shrinking after
   orphan sweeps (fix(api): prune stale team index entries when ZSET orphans are swept #3567), or stable at steady state.
2. Evictor sweep duration — no way to know how long each
   `ZRANGEBYSCORE + MGET pipeline` takes, or whether sweep latency is
   increasing as the ZSET grows.

Without these two signals it is impossible to:

• Set an alert before the ZSET grows large enough to cause latency spikes
• Verify that orphan cleanup (fix(api): prune stale team index entries when ZSET orphans are swept #3567) or future sharding fixes are actually
  reducing cardinality
• Correlate Redis command latency spikes with evictor tick cost

Production evidence

Observed 2026-08-14 09:00 – 09:30 (Redis big-key scan):

At `pollInterval = 50 ms` and N API allocations, the evictor issues
20 × N `ZRANGEBYSCORE` calls per second against the 22 k-member ZSET.
This load is currently invisible — there is no metric showing either the
key size trend or the per-sweep cost.

Observability gap

Why a gauge for size, not sampled on every evictor tick?

`global:expiration` is already the key being diagnosed as a high-frequency
hot key. Sampling `ZCARD` on every 50 ms evictor tick would add 20 × N
extra Redis calls per second — worsening the problem while observing it.
A single `ZCARD` piggybacked on the existing heal pass (every 5 min,
same cadence as #3604) adds negligible overhead and is sufficient for
capacity planning and alerting.

Why sweep duration matters

`ZRANGEBYSCORE` is O(log N + K) where N = 22,458 and K = batch size (256).
As N grows the per-sweep cost grows. Correlating sweep duration with ZSET
size over time makes the relationship visible before it becomes a latency
incident.

Related

• sandbox/storage: stale team-index SET entries accumulate when sandbox keys are lost without going through Remove() #3566 / fix(api): prune stale team index entries when ZSET orphans are swept #3567 — stale team-index entries that may be inflating
  `global:expiration` via orphaned ZSET members
• perf(api): cjson.decode in startTransitionScript Lua script blocks Redis event loop under concurrent evictions #3602 / perf(api): avoid cjson.decode in startTransitionScript hot path #3603 — `cjson.decode` blocking Redis event loop on
  `startTransitionScript` (separate hot path)
• obs(api): record team sandbox index SET size as a histogram #3604 — per-team index SET size histogram (same observability series)
• RFC: Evaluate replacing Redis with DragonflyDB as the caching backend #3591 — RFC: evaluate DragonflyDB as caching backend; ZSET size and
  sweep latency metrics would provide the baseline needed to evaluate
  whether a backend switch is warranted

/cc @jakubno @dobrac @ValentaTomas