The file watcher registered a recursive watch over the entire project (node_modules, build output, caches included) and filtered only in the callback — exhausting the Linux inotify budget on large repos (#276). It now uses chokidar and excludes the same directories the indexer ignores (built-in default-ignore set + the project .gitignore) BEFORE registering a watch, so the watch count on a 900-dir node_modules drops from ~1200 to ~14 even with no .gitignore. Stacks with the shared daemon (#411): one watcher across agents, now small.
Also hardens the #411 daemon lockfile against a concurrent-startup race the new watcher timing made reproducible — the lock is now created atomically with its content (temp-write + hard-link), so racing daemons can never both win. Validated on macOS, Linux (Docker), and Windows (chokidar + fs.linkSync on NTFS).
Co-Authored-By: Colby McHenry <me@colbymchenry.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
One shared, detached daemon per project root: every `codegraph serve --mcp` is a thin stdio<->socket proxy (Unix socket / Windows named pipe) to it, so N agents in one repo share a single file watcher, SQLite connection, and tree-sitter warm-up instead of N copies. The daemon outlives any single session and reaps via client-refcount + idle timeout; `CODEGRAPH_NO_DAEMON=1` opts out.
Hardened during review: detached-process lifecycle (preserves the #277 watchdog via the proxy; the daemon no longer orphans on host SIGKILL), atomic lockfile + pid-verified stale-clear (no double-daemon on concurrent startup), realpath root canonicalization. Validated on macOS, Linux (Docker - 3x fewer inotify watches for 3 agents), and Windows (named pipes); A/B confirms byte-identical tool output vs direct mode. Closes#411.
Co-Authored-By: Colby McHenry <me@colbymchenry.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
