checkId: check.timestamp.tsa.response-time plugin: stellaops.doctor.timestamping severity: warn tags: [timestamping, tsa, latency, performance]

TSA Response Time

This Stella Ops Doctor check measures how quickly each configured TSA endpoint responds and flags latency that could slow the evidence pipeline. It is most relevant to operators running high-throughput release pipelines, where slow timestamping becomes a bottleneck that delays every promoted artifact.

What It Checks

Measures TSA endpoint response times against configurable thresholds. The check:

Why It Matters

High TSA latency slows down the evidence generation pipeline. Every release artifact that needs a timestamp will be delayed by slow TSA responses. In high-throughput environments, TSA latency can become a bottleneck that blocks the entire release pipeline.

Common Causes

How to Fix

Docker Compose

Consider adding a geographically closer TSA endpoint or a local TSA:

environment:
  Timestamping__WarnLatencyMs: "5000"
  Timestamping__CriticalLatencyMs: "30000"

Bare Metal / systemd

# Test TSA latency manually
time curl -s -o /dev/null https://freetsa.org/tsr

# Add a faster TSA endpoint
stella tsa add --name "LocalTSA" --url "https://tsa.internal.example.com/tsr"

Kubernetes / Helm

timestamping:
  warnLatencyMs: 5000
  criticalLatencyMs: 30000

Consider deploying a local TSA proxy or cache to reduce latency.

Verification

stella doctor run --check check.timestamp.tsa.response-time