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Lesson 27
6 min

PT: Process Triage

Intelligent process management with Bayesian scoring

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Goal

Master intelligent process management with Process Triage.

What Is Process Triage?

PT (Process Triage) identifies and terminates abandoned or zombie processes using a Bayesian-inspired scoring algorithm. It evaluates process type, age, orphan status, and resource usage to calculate abandonment probability.

PT remembers your kill/spare decisions for similar processes, improving recommendations over time. It requires explicit confirmation and attempts graceful SIGTERM first.

Smart Search

Find processes by name, PID, or resource usage

Resource Analysis

See CPU, memory, and I/O at a glance

Problem Detection

Identify runaway and zombie processes

Safe Actions

Signal processes with confirmation

Try It: Process Triage Dashboard

Process Triage Dashboard

Navigate scenarios to see how PT diagnoses different system states

Normal SystemStep 1/6

Healthy system with typical development workloads. All processes within expected ranges.

System Resources
28%
CPU
28M/100M
32%
RAM
5.1G/16.0G
3%
Swap
128M/4.0G
Load Avg
1.24 1.10 0.98
8 cores
Disk I/O
9.5 MB/s8.7 MB/s
PIDSProcessCPU%MEMI/ODanger
Process Tree
S1systemd
├─R1842node (next-dev)
├─S2201postgres
└─S4100sshd
terminal
$ pt --top
Process Triage v2.4 -- scanning 147 processes
System load: 1.24 (healthy)
 
All processes nominal. No action needed.

Essential Commands

Show process overview
Show top resource consumers
Find processes by name
Show all options
Pro Tip
PT is useful when agents need to diagnose why builds are slow or what's consuming resources.

Common Scenarios

bash
# Find what's using CPU
pt --top
# Search for node processes
pt search node
# Find processes using port 3000
pt --port 3000

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