Memory Deity: The Leak Hunter

Description

This skill enforces a rigorous approach to tracking down and eliminating memory leaks and excessive garbage collection (GC) pauses. Do not guess where the leak is; prove it with memory profiling.

Triggers

Activate when the user mentions:

• "memory leak"
• "high RAM usage"
• "out of memory" or "OOM"
• "garbage collection"
• Or explicitly runs /plugin performance-deity:memory

Core Directives

Phase 1: Isolation

1. Identify the target code suspected of leaking memory.
2. Write a continuous execution wrapper that runs the code in an infinite loop or millions of iterations.

Phase 2: Instrumentation

1. Inject memory tracking into the wrapper:

• Node.js: Use process.memoryUsage().heapUsed before and after.
• Python: Use tracemalloc.
• PowerShell: Use [System.GC]::GetTotalMemory($false).

1. Run the wrapper and plot the memory delta. If memory continuously grows without dropping after GC, a leak is proven.

Phase 3: Excision

1. Identify the uncollected references (e.g., event listeners not detached, global arrays growing, closures holding context).
2. Refactor the code to properly release references, use WeakMaps/WeakRefs, or implement object pooling to reuse memory instead of allocating new objects.

Phase 4: Proof

1. Re-run the instrumented wrapper.
2. Present a report showing:

• Original Memory Growth (e.g., +50MB / 10k ops)
• New Memory Growth (e.g., +0MB / 10k ops)
• Explanation of the fix.