dsh-dock-vitals

Live CPU / memory / GPU readout in the DeepSeek Harness composer status bar — a small clickable badge next to the built-in context meter.

2 turns 30 steps · 98 tok/s │ 1.8M tok · cache 84% │ 6%
CPU 13%  MEM 87%  GPU 15%
                ↑ this plugin's badge, right of the context meter

• Display-only plugin. It registers no tools for the model. Samples never enter the conversation context and are never sent anywhere.
• Three metrics out of the box — CPU / memory / GPU; video memory and GPU temperature are one toggle away in settings.
• GPU works across vendors, no admin rights: nvidia-smi, rocm-smi, macOS ioreg, and Windows PDH counters as the catch-all. Whichever backend answers is named in the snapshot, and a backend that cannot report a field leaves it blank instead of printing 0.
• Click the badge for a details panel: per-metric values, GPU model, core count and capacity.
• Three refresh presets: fast 1.5 s / medium 3 s / slow 10 s (default 3000 ms).
• Opening ten sessions still samples once — every badge shares one snapshot and one timer.
• Sampling stops on its own 15 seconds after the last reader.
• Follows the host language (Chinese / English), including the details panel and tooltips.

Install

dsh plugin --profile <profile> add dsh-dock-vitals

Or drop the tarball in:

dsh plugin --profile <profile> add ./dsh-dock-vitals-0.1.0.tgz

Restart DSH afterwards.

Data sources

Metric	Source	Notes
CPU	Node os.cpus() sampled twice	Machine-wide busy percentage (1 - Δidle/Δtotal), not per-core. The first sample has no baseline and reads empty.
Memory	os.totalmem() / os.freemem()
GPU	A vendor CLI, probed per platform (see below)	When nothing answers, GPU shows — while CPU and memory keep working.

GPU backends, tried in this order on each platform — the first that answers wins, and the winner is remembered so later ticks skip the dead ones:

Platform	Backend	Command	Permission	Video memory / temperature
Windows / Linux, NVIDIA	nvidia-smi	--query-gpu=... --format=csv,noheader,nounits	none	both
Windows, any vendor	PDH counters via typeperf	"\GPU Engine(*)\Utilization Percentage" -sc 2 -si 1	none	neither
Linux, AMD	rocm-smi	-u --showmemuse --showmeminfo vram -t --showtemp --showproductname --csv	none	both
macOS, any GPU	ioreg (IOKit registry)	-r -d 1 -w 0 -c IOAccelerator	none	used only (no total)

typeperf is the only way to read a GPU on Windows for AMD/Intel — ROCm is Linux-only — so it is worth knowing its cost: one round takes ~2.7 s, where nvidia-smi takes ~50 ms. That is why GPU sampling is decoupled from the badge refresh rate: CPU and memory keep their own cadence, and the GPU value is served from the last completed reading.

Aggregation follows Task Manager: sum each process per engine type, then take the busiest engine type per adapter, then the busiest adapter. Summing every instance together over-reports, and reading only the 3D engine misses video encode/decode load entirely.

A field the active backend cannot report is null in the snapshot, never 0 — a missing temperature and a 0 °C temperature are different things. The details panel hides those rows rather than printing a made-up number.

The host side exposes one read-only endpoint:

GET /dsh-dock-vitals/snapshot

{
  "cpu": { "percent": 13.2, "cores": 24 },
  "memory": { "usedPercent": 87.3, "usedGiB": 13.7, "totalGiB": 15.7 },
  "gpu": {
    "available": true,
    "name": "NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU",
    "utilPercent": 15,
    "memoryUsedMiB": 1816,
    "memoryTotalMiB": 8188,
    "temperatureC": 64,
    "clockMegahertz": 2370
  },
  "gpuError": null,
  "gpuBackend": "nvidia-smi",
  "host": { "platform": "win32", "release": "10.0.26300" },
  "intervalMs": 3000,
  "updatedAt": 0
}

gpuBackend names the backend that produced the reading, so "why is my GPU blank / missing a temperature" is answerable from the payload itself. Non-loopback callers get 403; anything but GET/HEAD gets 405.

Settings

Settings → System Status:

Option	Default	Notes
Enable badge	on	Off means the badge never renders and never fetches
CPU	on
Memory	on
GPU	on
Video memory	off	Unavailable while GPU is off
GPU temperature	off	Same
Refresh interval	3000 ms	1500 – 60000 ms

Every field is volatile, so changes apply immediately without a restart. Configuration lives in the settings namespace dock-vitals — the id of the plugin's entry in your profile.

Compatibility

• dsh >=0.2.0-rc.1 (developed and verified on 0.2.0-rc.2).
• Node >=22.
• Windows / macOS / Linux. CPU and memory come from Node's os; the GPU backends are read-only CLIs and registry reads (nvidia-smi, typeperf, rocm-smi, ioreg). Nothing needs administrator rights — this deliberately avoids powermetrics, which is macOS's richest GPU source but requires sudo on every call.
• Works in both the desktop app and the browser GUI: dsh.client.platform is web, and the desktop app is a shell around the same web frontend.

Development notes

• Client components may only require modules from the host whitelist (react, react/jsx-runtime, react-dom, react-dom/client, @deepseek-ai/cordis, @deepseek-ai/dsh-client-store, @deepseek-ai/dsh-client-ui-slots, @deepseek-ai/dsh-client-ui-primitives, @deepseek-ai/dsh-client-ui-dockkit). Anything else fails to resolve, and a throwing require kills the factory → the entry fails → the desktop build refuses to open. Wrap every require in try/catch and ship a fallback.
• Never call a hook inside apply(). useSyncExternalStore's getSnapshot must return a stable reference — an object rebuilt on every call causes an infinite re-render loop.
• Styles use --dsw-* theme tokens only; literal colours are reserved for graphics.
• UI is contributed through ctx.slots.inject(ownerKey, () => ctx.slots.register(...)).

License

MIT