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by interlinked 1095 days ago
Too bad it isn't a drop in replacement for tmux because of memory usage. There are memory leaks and even without that the base memory uses is a couple hundred megabytes. Tmux on the other hand, consumes only tens of megabytes of memory.
4 comments

Hey, there are no memory leaks that I'm aware of (there were a few, but we plugged them in recent months). If you know differently, I'd appreciate an issue report.
If you run e.g. btop or bpytop in a separate zellij tab, zellij will eventually gobble up all your memory and die.

In the beginning I wa very entusiastic and switched from tmux to zellij on remote machines, but as I usually have btop running in a tab it would die in a day or two, so now I'm back to using tmux on remote machines and reserve zellij for local (and make sure I don't run btop in a tab).

(Does HN have an indentation limit, I can't seem to reply to imsnif…)

I'm always running the latest zellij, but I'll start btop in a tab right away and see what happens.

I did mention it in https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij/issues/1625#issuecommen... and noticed the issue is still open, so I haven't tried btop in zellij since v0.36.0.

Keeping track is hard sometimes, I saw it again in the issue as you mentioned. :)
I'm like 90% sure this was fixed - if you'd be willing to try with a recent Zellij version, that would be great.

Otherwise, I'll try your reproduction myself and will fix if I can reproduce. Thanks.

I'm now running v0.37.2 on a remote machine with 3 tabs: a shell, syslog spooled by lnav, and btop. To me it looks like it grows by 2 kB RAM every minute. I am logging to a file with timestamps, and we will see the results tomorrow.
In the course of less than 12 hours zellij grew from 93 MB to 1227 MB in roughly 2 kB increments per minute. Closing the tab running btop will release the stolen memory.

I will append a comment to the Microsoft GitHub issue mentioned above a little later.

Thanks! If you could also specify how you measured it and attach some debug logs (there are instructions in the issue template) that would be great. Because my instance has run overnight without issue and I'd love to be able to reproduce this.
Yeah, and it does flicker a bit etc.

But I still use it all the time now — I found it so much easier to get up to speed with relative to tmux. And it's getting better all the time, so I'm happy to invest in it...

Leaks like crazy on macOS.

For WebAssembly plugins, I also wish they used Extism, which is kinda the de facto standard for this.

Yeah and sudden unexplained crashed made me stop using