The shared daemon's inactivity backstop (#692) reaped the daemon after
maxIdleMs (default 30 min) of no inbound query bytes whenever a client was
still connected — without ever checking whether that client was actually
alive. lastActivityAt is fed only by inbound socket data and MCP has no
keepalive, so a genuinely-live session that just hadn't queried CodeGraph in
30 min tripped it. The daemon then exited, and the proxy's onDaemonLost
degrades that session (and every other session sharing the daemon) to an
in-process engine for the rest of its life. On one dev machine over a day the
backstop fired 20 times on live sessions (clients=1) and the liveness sweep
caught 0 real dead peers — net harm.
The backstop exists only to catch a phantom client (one counted but gone,
whose socket-close was never delivered). It now consults the peer pids the
daemon already tracks: after the inactivity window it sweeps provably-dead
peers, then reaps the daemon only if NO remaining client can be proven alive
(every one is an unknown-pid connection the sweep can't verify — the sole
phantom class it can't catch). One provably-alive client keeps the daemon up.
Extracted the decision into Daemon.backstopShouldExit(isAlive) so it's unit-
testable with an injected liveness probe, mirroring reapDeadClients. All #692
guarantees preserved; the only behavior change is that a provably-alive quiet
session is no longer reaped.
- daemon-client-liveness.test.ts: 7 new deterministic cases for
backstopShouldExit (live kept, phantom reaped, mixed protects the live one,
dead-peer swept-then-held, within-window, zero-client).
- mcp-daemon.test.ts: the integration test that asserted the backstop reaps a
live connected client (it encoded the bug) now asserts the opposite — a
live-but-quiet session survives several backstop windows with its lockfile
intact and no backstop shutdown logged.
Validated end-to-end on the built bundle: a quiet session's daemon stayed up
across 4 backstop windows (maxIdle=3s), same pid throughout, zero backstop
fires. Found while fixing #1185.
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
When an MCP host (opencode and others) SIGTERM's the shared daemon as a new
session starts, the existing session's proxy used to exit on the dropped socket
— silently losing CodeGraph for that session, and hanging any request in flight
at the drop. The SIGTERM originates in the host's process-tree teardown, not in
CodeGraph (nothing here signals another process), so the fix is proxy
resilience, not chasing the signal.
The local-handshake proxy now treats a daemon disconnect as recoverable rather
than terminal: it falls back to its in-process engine for the rest of the
session (the same path used when no daemon is reachable at startup, and what
CODEGRAPH_NO_DAEMON does) and re-serves any requests that were in flight to the
dead daemon, so the host never hangs. The proxy still exits when the HOST goes
away (stdin close / PPID watchdog) — only daemon loss is now non-fatal.
Also replaces the over-the-wire liveness-sweep test added in #712 — which was
flaky under heavy parallel load (a raced raw-socket connect) — with a
deterministic Daemon.reapDeadClients unit test. The client-hello round-trip is
still exercised by every daemon test (the real proxy now sends it).
Validated with a reproduction (proxy stays alive, in-flight request answered,
post-drop request recovers) and a regression test in mcp-daemon.test.ts.
Confirmed on macOS (full suite green) and a Windows 11 VM.
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Layer-2 defense-in-depth follow-up to the Windows PPID watchdog fix (#711).
That fix makes an orphaned proxy exit so its socket closes and the daemon
reaps via the refcount + idle timer. This adds two daemon-side safety nets for
the residual case where a socket close is never delivered (a Windows named-pipe
hazard) and a phantom client would otherwise pin the daemon forever:
- Liveness sweep: a proxy now sends an optional client-hello carrying its pid
(+ host pid) right after verifying the daemon hello; the daemon periodically
drops any client whose peer process is dead, re-arming the idle timer.
Fail-safe and version-pinned — a connection that never sends the hello just
falls back to the socket-close lifecycle, and the daemon reads it before the
transport so a non-hello first line is handed through untouched.
- Inactivity backstop: the daemon exits after a generous no-traffic window
(CODEGRAPH_DAEMON_MAX_IDLE_MS, default 30 min) even with clients attached, so
a phantom client that sends nothing can't keep it alive.
Pure helpers (parseClientHelloLine, peerIsDead) are unit-tested; the full
handshake + sweep and the backstop are covered end-to-end in mcp-daemon.test.ts.
Validated on a real Windows 11 VM: the sweep reaps a dead-pid client over a
named pipe and the backstop fires with a client still connected.
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
