Empty Video Rooms Are Cleaned Up Through Leases and Periodic Reconciliation

A technical guide argues that video rooms should not be deleted the moment the last participant leaves. Instead, the room is marked empty and held through a bounded grace period, followed by a second authoritative occupancy check before teardown. The article contends that deletion should be modeled as a state transition rather than a callback, with leave events starting suspicion and later observations confirming absence. It recommends expiring presence leases stored in an authoritative system, separating ephemeral signals like typing indicators and read receipts from connection state, and running a periodic reconciler as the repair path. The author also suggests measuring how long rooms stay empty rather than counting successful callbacks.