Dedupe, tombstone stripping and the lifecycle lift decoded a node's
whole settings blob into generic maps and wrote it back indented, so a
deeply nested value anywhere in it cost the square of its depth on every
merge (10 KB became 50 MB). They now split the blob one level deep, read
only email, expiryTime and enable of each client entry, keep everything
else as raw text and write the result compactly.
Adding a user to multi-node inbounds could leave 3-6 identical entries
in one inbound's settings.clients array: addInboundClient appended
incoming clients unconditionally, and the duplicate-email precheck
exempts a matching subId (so one identity can span several inbounds),
so a retried or raced add of the same client re-appended it to an
inbound that already carried it - on the master and, since nodes run
the same code, on every node, whose snapshot adoption then copied the
duplicates back verbatim. The normalized clients/client_inbounds tables
stayed clean (unique constraints), which is why the phantom rows only
showed in settings-driven views like the Detach clients modal, where
duplicate React keys also broke the selection counter.
Three layers: addInboundClient now skips incoming clients whose email
is already on the target inbound (idempotent re-adds instead of
duplication), node snapshot adoption collapses duplicate emails before
writing the central row, and an idempotent startup repair rewrites any
inbound whose settings still carry duplicates from older builds.
Closes#5770
MHSanaei