xReaper

Understand resource pressure. Investigate runaway processes. Keep macOS development work moving.

xReaper is a macOS command-line resource monitor and process reaper built for development machines running demanding tools and AI coding sessions. It brings system telemetry, process classification, and configurable intervention into one self-contained script.

Overview

High CPU use, growing memory consumption, and rapid process creation can make a development machine unresponsive. xReaper samples system and process activity, reports suspicious behavior, and provides a dry-run mode for reviewing findings without signaling target processes.

A reported incident—“a container runtime exhausting open files crashed a build host.”—is informing the next stage of development: open-file monitoring and stricter evidence requirements before intervention. Prevention of that failure mode has not yet been demonstrated.

Key features in the current prototype

• Terminal resource reporting: CPU, memory, load, and disk activity in gauge, compact, or plain-text layouts.
• Process classification: CPU pressure, RSS growth, process births, duplicate processes, orphaned agents, and zombie-child populations.
• Review before action: explicit dry-run reporting plus JSON summaries for automation.
• Protection checks: the reaper's own ancestry, its current terminal, and designated critical processes receive protection checks.
• Agent-session capture workflow: capture and resume integration exists for selected coding agents. Its durability and termination safeguards are under active remediation; it is not a guarantee of session recovery.
• Self-contained delivery: embedded terminal rendering and a small native telemetry probe, with support for Apple Silicon and Intel builds.
• Optional scheduling: a per-user background schedule or a continuous command-line watch loop.

Disk read/write gauges represent operations per second. The native probe supplies cumulative per-process byte counters; these are different measurements.

Platforms and requirements

xReaper is a macOS shell tool using zsh and native macOS command-line utilities. Its telemetry probe requires a C compiler and macOS SDK on first build. Internal validation records include Apple Silicon on macOS 27.2 and Intel on macOS 26.7.1; these observations are not a published minimum-version support commitment.

It runs in a user account. Access to processes owned by other users is limited by operating-system permissions. A graphical menu-bar app and privileged helper are planned.

Status and availability

Version 1.2.0 is an internal dogfood prototype. Public distribution and a release date have not been established.

By default xReaper samples and warns; it sends no signals to target processes. Qualified automatic reaping is enabled explicitly with --auto-reap, and a multi-sample rate gate must pass before any termination signal. Open-file and system file-table counts are reported as alerts only; automatic reaping based on open-file counts is not a feature.

Links

• xreaper.app — planned website. The domain is being purchased; this is a planned destination, not a live-product or download claim.

Content reviewed September 27, 2026.