A wedged mempalace-mcp (classically an OrbStack virtiofs cold-open of a
large chroma.sqlite3 / HNSW load) left the awaiting JSON-RPC promise
pending forever, freezing the pi TUI uninterruptibly: ESC cancels the
LLM stream, not a pending tool execute().
The JSON-RPC client now arms a per-request timer. On expiry it rejects
the request AND kills the stalled child (SIGTERM->SIGKILL), so pi gets
an error instead of hanging; the extension flips available=false so
later calls fail fast (restart pi to retry). Per-REQUEST, not
per-process: the long-lived server only dies on a genuine stall.
Knobs: MEMPALACE_MCP_TIMEOUT_MS (default 60000),
MEMPALACE_MCP_INIT_TIMEOUT_MS (default 120000), 0 = disable.
This supersedes the planned standalone stdio-watchdog shim: the
extension already owns request/response correlation, so a separate
framing-reparsing shim is unnecessary.
joakimp
a3b8829991