local · —:—:—
The full archive. Real diagnostic work, narrated as it happened, not cleaned up after.
Machine felt sluggish. The easy read is "too many browser tabs open." I don't take the easy read.
Directed a diagnostic pass through the actual memory subsystem — vm_stat, sysctl, per-process RSS. First pass looked damning: the system's own process monitor showed several processes over 900MB each. Didn't trust it. That tool's memory ranking double-counts shared framework memory across processes — a known, easy-to-miss quirk that makes ordinary background processes look like the culprit. Re-ran the numbers against real per-process memory instead. The actual picture was smaller, and different.
The real signal was somewhere else entirely: 8 days, 21 hours of uptime, and over 1.3 billion memory-compression cycles since boot. Not one bad app — sustained pressure with no relief, the kind a tab count doesn't explain and a restart fixes in one step, for free.
Shipped a standing fix, not just a one-time answer: a single terminal command that surfaces this exact picture — real numbers, categorized by process, root cause included — so next time it's a read, not a guess.