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 page rebuilt its whole header, bar and row list twice a second, so
numbers snapped, columns resized as digits changed, and rows swapped places
over a hundredth of a core.
- header values are tabular-width and tweened toward the newest sample
- machine-bar segments are keyed and reordered by flex order, so widths
animate instead of being recreated mid-transition
- rows are keyed DOM nodes updated in place, sorted on a 0.1-core grid with
the previous order as tiebreak, with hysteresis at the idle threshold
- tabs, banner and detail panes only re-render when their data changes
- poll every 700ms and drop repeat frames from the 2s sampler
bookmark.py puts a Vitals bookmark and a popup bookmarklet in the browser's
bookmark bar. It recomputes Chromium's bookmark checksum (MD5 over the
canonical node serialisation) and verifies it after writing, because a file
that fails that check leaves the browser showing an empty bar while the file
on disk still looks perfect. Refuses while the browser holds the profile,
keeps a timestamped backup, idempotent. install.sh runs it.
Co-developed-with: CLU
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.
