The liveness watchdog judged the main thread by heartbeat silence alone,
which cannot distinguish a true wedge (the #850 infinite loop it exists to
kill) from one long synchronous SQLite statement on severely degraded
storage — so it SIGKILLed valid, in-progress indexes (observed on a
150-IOPS throttled rig, and latent on real HDDs at scale).
The CLI index/init paths now hand the watchdog the project's DB + WAL
paths. On a silent timeout the watchdog child stats them first: if they
advanced during the silence, the block is a slow store making forward
progress — defer and keep watching; if not, kill at the base timeout
exactly as before. Deferral is bounded by a hard cap (10× the timeout) of
continuous silence so a wedge coinciding with unrelated file activity, or
I/O hung beyond any legitimate statement, still dies. The daemon path is
unchanged (no progress paths — pure heartbeat).
Validated with real spawned processes (defer-on-progress, kill-on-static,
hard-cap kill) and on the throttled rig: a 150-IOPS index under a 10s
watchdog window — 6× tighter than production, with store stalls measured
at 10-20s — completes cleanly where the old watchdog killed it, while
true-wedge kill latency is unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Colby McHenry
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