system-performance-remediation

name	system-performance-remediation
description	Restore machine responsiveness via safe, selective process cleanup. Use when system unresponsive, high CPU/load average, IO pressure, filesystem cache bloat, memory pressure from btrfs/ext4, stuck tests, competing cargo builds, confused agents in loops, swap thrashing, disk full, systemd-oomd kills, or tmux/zellij session sprawl.

System Performance Remediation

Core Principle: First, do no harm. Kill OBVIOUSLY useless processes before touching anything potentially useful.

The Whack-a-Mole Anti-Pattern: Killing child processes (cargo builds, tests) is POINTLESS if confused parent agents respawn them. Kill the confused agents, not their children.

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Quick Reference — Copy-Paste Commands

# === INSTANT DIAGNOSIS ===
uptime && nproc && cat /proc/pressure/cpu | head -1

# === ONE-LINER STATUS (includes swap + memory pressure) ===
echo "Load: $(uptime | awk -F'load average:' '{print $2}') / $(nproc) cores | Mem: $(free -h | awk '/Mem:/{print $3"/"$2}') | Swap: $(free -h | awk '/Swap:/{print $3"/"$2}') | Zombies: $(ps -eo stat | grep -c '^Z' || echo 0) | MemP: $(awk -F= '/some/{print $2}' /proc/pressure/memory | cut -d' ' -f1)%"

# === VM TUNING CHECK (catches cache bloat before it kills sessions) ===
sysctl vm.vfs_cache_pressure vm.min_free_kbytes &&  /proc/pressure/memory


ps -eo pid,etimes,pcpu,args --=-etimes | grep -E  | awk 


ps -eo pid,etimes,pcpu,rss,args | grep  | grep -v grep | awk 


ps aux | grep -E  | grep -v grep |  -l


ps aux | grep cc1plus | grep -oP  |  |  -c


ps -eo pid,etimes,pcpu,args | grep -E  | awk 


ps -eo pid,etimes,args | grep -E  | awk  | xargs -r 


 pid  $(pgrep -f ) $(pgrep cc1plus);  renice 19 -p ; ionice -c 3 -p ;  2>/dev/null


zellij list-sessions 2>&1 | grep -c EXITED