resourcer

A native Windows desktop dashboard for live system resources — real-time CPU, memory, disk and network charts plus a sortable process manager with a kill action. Sampling runs on a background thread so the UI never freezes.

Stack: Python 3.11 · PySide6 (Qt 6) · psutil · pyqtgraph · numpy

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Features

• Live charts (60-second scrolling window, 1 Hz):
  • CPU — overall load over per-core lines
  • Memory percent
  • Disk read / write rate (bytes/s, byte-formatted axis)
  • Network down / up rate (bytes/s)
• Toolbar stat cards — CPU %, RAM %, net down, net up at a glance.
• Process table — PID / name / CPU% / memory, sortable (numeric, not lexical) with a name filter; refreshes every 2 s and keeps your selection.
• Kill a process — confirmation dialog (defaults to Cancel), graceful terminate with a force-kill fallback, and friendly handling of permission-denied / already-exited cases. No traceback ever reaches the UI.
• Adjustable poll interval (1 s / 2 s / 5 s) and a dark theme.

Measured numbers

Measured on a 12-thread Windows 11 machine:

Metric	Target	Measured
Metrics sampled per tick @ 1 Hz	20+	20 (1 overall + 12 per-core + 3 memory + 2 disk + 2 net)
Cold start to first chart point	< 2 s	~1.6 s
UI responsiveness	no freeze	sampling off the UI thread; the only hitch is a brief (~90 ms) GIL pause while psutil scans all processes, which is why the process scan runs at 2 s, not 1 s
Process kill	safe, fast	terminate is immediate; force-kill fallback after a 0.5 s grace window; AccessDenied/NoSuchProcess never crash
Pure-logic test coverage	80%+	100% (123 statements, 40 tests)

Architecture

Three layers with a strict one-directional dependency rule — the UI never imports psutil, and the sampler never imports Qt:

UI (main_window, ui/)        Qt widgets, charts, table — receive samples via signal
   ▲ Qt signal (auto-queued, thread-safe)
Worker (metrics/worker)      QObject on a QThread; two QTimers drive sampling
   ▲ plain call
Sampler (metrics/sampler)    psutil wrapper; turns cumulative counters into rates

This keeps the OS-boundary code isolated and the pure logic unit-testable without a Qt event loop. See PLAN.md for the full design.

Run from source

python -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python main.py

Develop

pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
pytest                      # run tests
pytest --cov=src            # with coverage
pyright                     # type gate
pip-audit -r requirements.txt

Build a portable executable

pyinstaller --noconfirm --onedir --windowed --name resourcer \
  --paths src --collect-submodules pyqtgraph main.py

The build lands in dist/resourcer/. It is a portable --onedir bundle (~160 MB, mostly Qt + numpy) that runs without Python installed. The binary is unsigned, so Windows SmartScreen / Application Control may warn on first launch.

License

MIT