Notifier for High Memory Usage

A simple tool to notify you when your system memory usage is too high.

Features:

• uses notify-send to send notifications when memory usage reaches a certain threshold
• built for Linux (tested on Ubuntu 22.04 X11)
• configurable threshold, check memory usage interval and resend notification delay

Example desktop notification:

Usage

Example usage that monitors memory usage by checking every 2 seconds, sends a notification when memory usage is above 80% and will not resend another notification until after 10 seconds.

notifymem -threshold 80 -delay 10 -interval 2

Run a test which will check memory usage and send a test notification:

notifymem -test

Installation

First, download the latest release or clone the repository and build locally using make build, which will create a binary in the bin directory. Then, copy the binary to a directory, like /opt/notifymem/bin, and make the file executable, like chmod +x /opt/notifymem/bin/notifymem.

Next, create a systemd service file in /etc/systemd/system/notifymem.service with the following content:

[Unit]
Description=notifymem service: notify when memory usage reaches a threshold
After=network.target,systemd-user-sessions.service,systemd-journald.service

[Service]
Type=simple
Restart=always
RestartSec=3
User=your-username
ExecStart=/opt/notifymem/bin/notifymem -threshold 80 -delay 30 -interval 2
Environment="DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/run/user/1000/bus"

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Make sure to:

• replace your-username with your actual username
• set ExecStart to the path where you copied the binary and use the desired options
• set Environment to the correct DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS value for your system, which can be found by running echo $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS

Finally, enable and start the service:

systemctl enable notifymem
systemctl start notifymem

Tips:

• check the status of the service using systemctl status notifymem
• check the logs of the service using journalctl -u notifymem (follow the logs using -f)
• reload the systemd daemon after making changes to the service file using systemctl daemon-reload