Eight identical 'call (WebRTC)' rows with no owner is the least useful thing
a monitor can print. Three changes:
- detail panes group processes by role with a plain-English gloss, a pid list,
and a judgement when a group looks abandoned ('11 of 14 idle for over 30
min, oldest 201.7h'). The hint states evidence and never says safe to delete,
because a muted call and a dead call both sit at zero.
- the tab list is one row per URL, duplicates summed with a count badge, each
row carrying the site's own favicon fetched through the local server and
cached on disk. Sites with no icon get a letter tile, never a third-party
icon service.
- Vitals' own cost is in the header, and its own tab is badged 'this screen'.
Tests caught a real bug while writing this: merge_tabs compared each tab to the
group running total, so the busiest tab could never name the row.
Co-developed-with: CLU
The first screenshot was captured on a real workstation: it carried a
machine name, a live call with a named participant, and a staging URL.
None of that belongs in a public repo.
--demo now loads demo/demo-snapshot.json and serves it through the same
API, so documentation screenshots are reproducible, reviewable, and free
of anyone's actual desktop. The canned snapshot is shaped to tell the
story: a leaked automation run at 6.10 cores with idle pages, and a video
call tab carrying 221% page work beside its idle siblings.
Process monitors stop at the browser boundary, so the thing that usually
pegs a machine is invisible: forty identical processes, no age, no tab
names, no idea which page is the offender.
Vitals resolves every process to a human identity (container, flatpak,
systemd unit, tree root, or script), then joins the OS view to the
browser's own DevTools counters so each tab carries its own page-work
number beside the cores its browser instance is burning. The gap between
those two numbers is the diagnosis: idle page, burning compositor.
- dependency-free sampler over /proc, 2s cadence, 5 min in-memory history
- minimal CDP client (WebSocket + JSON) with no third-party packages
- both unit systems side by side: percent of machine and fractional cores
- flags for leaked automation instances and live WebRTC calls
- user service with CPUQuota so the monitor can never be the problem
- identity tests that need no root, server, or browser
MIT licensed. Runs on Linux, reads /proc, asks for no privilege.
