The axios 401 interceptor calls clearAuthClientState() on every 401, which
dispatched "auth-changed"; the App handler re-fetched /auth/me, which 401'd
again → interceptor → clearAuthClientState() → "auth-changed" → ... an unbounded
request storm (observed live: 100+ GET /auth/me and climbing) that ran whenever
the user was logged out (login page, expired session) — burning CPU, network and
battery and flooding the server.
Fix: make clearAuthClientState idempotent — only emit "auth-changed" when it
actually removes a stored user key (a real signed-in→out transition), so
repeated 401s can no longer re-trigger the fetch.
Runtime-verified in a live stack: /auth/me went from 100+ & growing to 0 &
stable. login-page/settings tests green. Documented in
docs/performance/PERFORMANCE_IMPROVEMENTS.md (Phase 3.5 runtime finding).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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