procguard

Overview ¶

Package procguard ties long-lived child processes to the lifetime of the process that spawned them.

SpeechKit's CPU-heavy children — the wake-word sidecars, whisper-server and the local LLM server — are deliberately rooted in a background context so a short-lived HTTP request context cannot kill them (see cmd/speechkit/desktop_wakeword.go for that bug history). Their shutdown is owned by the host's own Close paths and the startup cleanup stack.

That covers every ORDERLY exit. It does not cover a crash, a taskkill, or a dev-loop rebuild that replaces the host binary: those skip the cleanup stack entirely and leave the children running forever. Each orphan holds on the order of a gigabyte of commit charge, so a day of restarts can exhaust the system commit limit while physical memory still looks healthy — at which point unrelated tools start failing to allocate (observed 2026-08-27: 6 orphans, ~7 GB, commit limit down to 0.4 GB free of 47.9 GB).

Adopt closes that gap by handing the child to the operating system: the OS terminates it when the parent goes away, however the parent goes away.