herd daemon · v0.1

Stop leaking memory.

The zero-zombie orchestrator for stateful workloads.

A dual-plane daemon that enforces dead-man's switches for your Go, Python, and Elixir processes.

$ curl -sL https://herdcore.io/install.sh | bash
Read the quickstart guide →

Visual proof

bash — 120×32

✗ without herd — 23:47:09 

  PID USER      %CPU %MEM COMMAND
 4821 deploy   98.7  12.3 chromium [orphan]
 4822 deploy   97.1  11.8 chromium [orphan]
 4823 deploy   95.4  11.2 chromium [orphan]
 4824 deploy   94.9  10.9 chromium [orphan]
 4825 deploy   93.2  10.6 chromium [orphan]

 [python3.11 crawler.py exited with SIGSEGV]
 [parent PID 4820 is gone — children abandoned]

 Mem used: 14.2 GB / 16 GB
 OOM killer invoked at 23:47:31
 System unresponsive.

✓ with herd — 23:47:09 

herd[data-plane]  stream breach detected
                   session: sess_7f3a2b
                   parent:  PID 4820 (SIGSEGV)
                   action:  reaping orphan group

herd[reaper]  SIGKILL → PID 4821 ✓
herd[reaper]  SIGKILL → PID 4822 ✓
herd[reaper]  SIGKILL → PID 4823 ✓
herd[reaper]  SIGKILL → PID 4824 ✓
herd[reaper]  SIGKILL → PID 4825 ✓

Mem freed: 14.1 GB in 3ms
System nominal. Next session ready.

Why it works

Dual-Plane Daemon

Control plane handles orchestration. Data plane does the actual reaping. Separation means neither path blocks the other—microsecond overhead end to end.

pdeathsig Switch

Relies on low-level OS guarantees, not fragile network heartbeats. When the parent dies, the kernel delivers the signal. No polling, no race conditions.

Language Agnostic

Drop-in SDKs for Go, Python, and Elixir, or speak raw TCP streams directly. If it runs on Linux, herd can manage it.