session-reaper

A Claude Code mod for the Claude desktop app on Windows. Every few minutes it:

1. Archives Code sessions that had no activity for longer than a limit (default 60 minutes). Running and pinned sessions are skipped; the app itself also refuses sessions that are open on screen or still have background work. Archived sessions can be restored from the Archived list.
2. Stops process trees that a session left behind. It records every process a claude.exe started (MCP servers, dev servers, shells). Once that claude.exe is gone, a tree is stopped only when every process in it is at least 60 minutes old and used almost no CPU since the previous check. chrome.exe, msedge.exe, Code.exe, claude.exe, explorer.exe and WindowsTerminal.exe are never stopped.

Every open session loads the mod, but only one of them does the work (a heartbeat in the plugin store picks it).

Why it exists

Each desktop Code session keeps its own claude.exe (about 0.8 GB) plus its own copy of every MCP server, and none of it goes away while the session sits in the sidebar. On a 32 GB machine, a day of work left 38 claude.exe (15 GB) and 88 node.exe (8 GB) processes running, the commit charge reached 47.1 of 47.6 GB, and Chrome crashed with an out-of-memory error. Archiving the idle sessions and stopping their leftover processes brought the commit charge down to 30 GB.

Requirements

• Windows installed in C:\Windows (the process step runs C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe by its fixed path and reads Win32_Process).

• The Claude desktop app's Code tab. The archive step calls the app's ccd_session_mgmt server, which other hosts (CLI, VS Code) do not have; there only the process step runs.

• In auto permission mode the archive call from a mod is refused unless it is allowed. Add this rule to permissions.allow in ~/.claude/settings.json:

  "mcp__ccd_session_mgmt__archive_session"
  

  The rule also lets Claude archive sessions in any chat without asking.

Install

/plugin install session-reaper --marketplace IT-BAER/claude-forge

Options

| Option | Default | Meaning | | --- | --- | --- | | idleMinutes | 60 | Archive a session idle for this many minutes | | orphanMinutes | 60 | Minimum age of every process in a left-behind tree | | cpuIdleMs | 1000 | Most CPU time (ms) a process may use between two checks and still count as idle | | intervalMinutes | 5 | How often the active session checks |

Only processes seen under a running claude.exe while the mod runs are tracked; trees left behind before the mod loaded are not touched.