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Tools

Servers

The curated list: every dev server on the machine, what it is costing you, and the three things you usually want to do to it.


What is in the list#

Servers is the short list — processes that passed one of the three detection signals, with the operating system's own machinery filtered out. That filtering is the feature. A list of everything listening is a list nobody reads.

How detection decides what belongs here.

Reading a row#

Each row is one server. The project name comes from the folder the process was started in rather than the process name, which is why you get acme-storefront instead of four rows all called node.

Memory is shown twice on purpose: a share of the whole machine, and the absolute figure. The share tells you whether it matters; the absolute figure tells you what you get back if you stop it. The reading turns amber once a process is running hot.

The detail screen#

Click a row — or press ↵ — and the server gets a screen of its own, in three tabs:

Stats
CPU and memory charted live, with peaks and averages, the full process tree behind the server, and a memory-drift figure per minute — the shape of a leak, caught while the server is still running.
Git
HEAD with its badge — detached, linked worktree, submodule — the commit, the origin remote, and when it last fetched.
Ports
Every address the server is bound to, each openable and copyable — and a plain sentence when one is bound to all interfaces, so nothing is reachable from your network without you knowing.

Open, copy, kill#

Three things happen to a dev server often enough to be worth a keypress:

Open
Launches the server in your default browser at the address it is actually bound to.
Copy
Puts that address on the clipboard — for a colleague, a phone on the same network, or a config file.
Kill
Stops the process. The port is free by the next scan, five seconds later at the outside.

Elevated processes

A server started from an elevated terminal cannot be stopped by an unelevated app, and Pip does not run elevated. Pip still shows the process and marks it, then tells you plainly that it cannot kill it — rather than offering a button that quietly does nothing.

Finding one row#

Press / and type. Search covers project names, ports and branches together, so you can go looking with whichever of the three you happen to remember.

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