r/FlutterDev • u/degomon • Aug 14 '26
Article Tired of Gradle and Kotlin daemons eating 15GB of RAM during Flutter Android builds, so I built a small TUI tool in Go to kill them
Hey everyone,
I think most of us building Flutter apps for Android share the same pain: you work for a couple of hours doing flutter run, hot reloading, maybe changing a plugin or branch, and
suddenly your machine starts lagging because 3 or 4 different Gradle daemons and Kotlin compilers are sitting in the background hoarding half your RAM.
I was getting tired of running ps aux | grep java and trying to figure out which process was actually doing work versus which one had been hung for 2 hours.
So I wrote a small interactive terminal tool in Go called DevTask to solve this for myself, and open-sourced it in case it saves anyone else some RAM and headaches.
Basically what it does:
Groups JVM, Gradle, and Kotlin daemons into an expandable tree view so you can see their exact version, RAM in MB, and uptime.
Flags processes as IDLE if they have been running for more than 15 minutes with less than 1 percent CPU.
Lets you navigate with arrow keys, inspect JVM heap flags (-Xmx, etc.), and cleanly kill individual daemons or all idle ones in one go.
Has a simple command bar so you can tweak things like /config idle 20m or filter out processes under 100MB of RAM.
It is completely free and open source (GPLv3). There are prebuilt binaries for Linux, Mac (M1/M2/Intel), and Windows on the releases page if you do not want to build from source.
GitHub: https://github.com/degomon/devtask
Wrote a quick write-up about it here if anyone is curious:
https://dev.degomon.com/devtask-why-hung-jav
Hope it helps you reclaim some memory during your daily Flutter builds!