# Python Memory Leak Detector — Live Process Memory Monitor with psutil and Rich

A real-time terminal dashboard written in Python that watches the **memory usage of running processes** and flags ones whose memory keeps growing — a simple heuristic for spotting possible memory leaks.

## Overview

Health Monitor continuously tracks the memory usage of the top processes on your system and flags any that show consistent upward growth — a common sign of a memory leak. The live dashboard refreshes every second and color-codes each process with a clear status indicator.

## Features

- Live terminal dashboard powered by the `rich` library
- Tracks the top N processes by memory usage
- Detects memory leaks by observing consistent growth over a rolling window of snapshots
- Three status levels per process:
  - **OK** — memory usage is stable
  - **WATCH** — memory has grown by more than 25 MB across the recent snapshot history
  - **LEAK** — memory has increased on 10 or more consecutive snapshots
- Footer shows detected leak PIDs or a "no leaks" confirmation with a timestamp
- Configurable number of processes to track and check interval via command-line arguments

## Leak Detection Logic

| Parameter | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Snapshot interval | 1 second | How often memory is sampled |
| `LEAK_THRESHOLD_MB` | 50 MB | WATCH is shown when growth exceeds half of this value (25 MB) |
| `LEAK_WINDOW` | 10 snapshots | Number of consecutive increases (of any size) that triggers LEAK |
| History length | 20 snapshots | Only the most recent 20 readings per process are kept |

These are heuristics, not proof of a leak: caches, garbage-collected runtimes, and applications that are legitimately loading data can also grow steadily.

## Requirements

```text
psutil
rich
```

Install dependencies:

```bash
pip install psutil rich
```

## Usage

From the `Console_Code` folder:

```bash
# Run with defaults (top 15 processes, 1-second interval)
python health_monitor.py

# Monitor top 20 processes
python health_monitor.py --top 20

# Check every 5 seconds
python health_monitor.py --interval 5

# Combine options
python health_monitor.py -n 20 -i 5
```

### Arguments

| Argument | Short | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| `--top` | `-n` | 15 | Number of processes to display and track |
| `--interval` | `-i` | 1 | Seconds between each memory snapshot |

## Dashboard Columns

| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| PID | Process ID |
| Process Name | Name of the process |
| Current (MB) | Current resident memory usage in megabytes |
| Growth (MB) | Memory change since the oldest of the (up to 20) stored snapshots |
| Status | OK / WATCH / LEAK |

## File Structure

```text
Health Monitor/
└── Console_Code/
    └── health_monitor.py    # Main script
```

## Notes

- Press `Ctrl+C` to stop monitoring. The dashboard is cleared on exit.
- Processes that exit mid-session are automatically removed from tracking.
- Processes that cannot be read (e.g., protected system processes) are silently skipped.
- The top-N list is recalculated on every snapshot, so a process that drops out of the top N stops being tracked.
- Memory is the resident set size (RSS) reported by `psutil`.

## Related Projects

- [Extract CPU Information](../Extract%20CPU%20Information/readme.md)
- [Back to all Python projects](../README.md)

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## Documentation links

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