Push, Pull, or Poll? Choosing an Agent Memory Ingestion Pattern

Choose ingestion patterns from freshness needs, source capabilities, and recovery requirements. Push delivers change notifications, polling discovers changes on a schedule, and on-demand pull fetches information when a task needs it. Many reliable integrations combine them.
A webhook does not guarantee complete delivery, and a periodic sync does not guarantee current answers. The application needs an accepted-version rule and a way to repair missed changes.
Use push for prompt change notification
An event can tell the connector that a record changed. Validate the event, retain its identity, and decide whether to trust its payload or fetch the authoritative current record. Retries and duplicate delivery should not create unrelated copies.
Do not assume events arrive in source order. An older event delivered late must not overwrite a newer revision. Keep a source revision or equivalent ordering field when the source supplies one.
Use polling for reconciliation
A cursor-based sync can recover changes missed during downtime. Commit the cursor only after the corresponding records have reached the connector's defined durable checkpoint. Otherwise, a crash can advance the cursor past work that never completed.
Track deletions and permission changes, not only new content. If the source's change feed omits some events, plan a periodic reconciliation that can find missing or inaccessible records without reimporting everything blindly.
Use on-demand pull for volatile authority
Some facts should be fetched from their owning system at answer time, such as current order status or access rights. A remembered summary can identify what to ask for, but it should not replace the authoritative lookup when freshness is essential.
Account for the latency and failure path. If the source is unavailable, say the current status could not be verified rather than presenting old memory as current fact.
Combine the patterns around one record identity
A webhook, a scheduled sync, and an on-demand fetch may encounter the same source. Map all three to a stable source ID and version rule. Record which path supplied each accepted revision so problems remain traceable.
For call-based sources, include the full audio-to-memory cost ledger when comparing ingestion patterns.
The ingestion architecture guide covers the downstream lifecycle. For supported services, review Supermemory's connectors and start with one test source. Verify a duplicate event, a missed event, and a permission change before enabling a broad sync.