MCP Dev Summit Bengaluru 2026

When we moved our multi-agent MCP system from REST to stdio transport, the protocol schema was not the problem. OS pipes have no safety nets.

When a model silently segfaults mid-inference, it does not send a JSON-RPC error. It just dies. The orchestrator sits blocked on a stdout.readline(), which never comes.

Then we hit the pipe buffer deadlock.

Inference engines are noisy. They dump token speeds and debug logs to stderr. If the orchestrator is waiting on stdout and ignoring stderr, the OS pipe buffer fills up to 64KB. The OS physically halts the model. The orchestrator waits for the model to finish. The model waits for the orchestrator to clear the pipe. Nobody moves.

To fix it we had to build async wrapper classes that continuously drain stderr into background loggers.

This talk covers what we learned:

- Draining stderr continuously or your process dies silently
- Managing SIGKILL and EOF lifecycles to flush sensitive data from RAM
- Replacing HTTP timeout assumptions with OS process management

If you are running MCP over stdio, this talk is the process management guide the MCP ecosystem has not written yet.