dead-process-mate

Dead Process Mate is a small app that lives in the Mac menu bar and keeps track of the development servers running on your computer, things like a vite server, a next.js dev server, or an npm watcher. Anyone who codes knows these can pile up quickly, especially when working with AI coding assistants, leaving ports blocked and memory used up long after you meant to stop them.

The app shows a list of these processes with friendly names instead of a confusing wall of generic entries, along with their CPU use, memory use, how long they have been running, and which project folder they belong to. It also shows which network ports are currently in use and which process owns each one, so you can quickly find what is blocking a port your new server wants to use.

Each process gets a colored status so you can tell at a glance if something needs attention: green for healthy, yellow for old or idle, orange for high CPU use, and red for orphaned or completely dead processes. You can kill any of them with one click, starting with a gentle stop signal that escalates to a forceful one if needed, or clear every flagged process at once.

It is built as a native Swift app rather than using Electron, so it stays small and light, and it reads process information directly from the operating system instead of running external commands. It makes no network connections at all.

Installation is through Homebrew or a direct download of the app file, and it requires macOS 14 or newer on Apple Silicon. This tool is for developers who regularly run local dev servers and want a simple way to see what is eating resources or blocking ports, and clean it up without digging through the terminal.