Time-Traveling Task Monitor

💡 Inspiration

I was frustrated by missing sudden PC lag spikes because traditional monitors (like Windows Task Manager) only show real-time data. I wanted an OS utility that let users rewind history to pinpoint exactly what caused a freeze while they were looking away.

🏗️ How I Built It

Using Python and psutil, a background daemon thread continuously measures OS kernel deltas. It stores these system snapshots directly into a fixed-capacity RingBuffer, utilizing modulo arithmetic ($idx \pmod k$) to overwrite oldest entries and strictly guarantee $O(1)$ static memory utilization.

🚧 Challenges I Faced

Standard input() calls blocked the execution loop, dropping visual frames. To fix this, I decoupled the background data pipeline using threading.Lock() and engineered a custom cross-platform byte scanner to intercept raw arrow-key hex bytes without pausing the UI thread.

🎓 What I Learned

By strictly enforcing a $O(1)$ memory footprint, I mastered how operating systems mathematically measure computational load, and how to circumvent massive framework overheads by physically painting text using high-speed ANSI escape rendering.

Built With

• msvcrt
• native-ansi-escapes
• psutil
• python
• termios