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Tuesday, February 10, 2015

tmux memory usage on linux



So a while ago I switched from screen to tmux. My reason for switching was that GNU screen didn't work in my docker containers and tmux did ;-)

All was well for a few months and I was replacing screen with tmux everywhere. It did have some other niceties besides working in containers and seem to do its job.

Until


USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
wim       1660  1.3 12.8 135056 131404 ?       Ss    2014 722:46 tmux -u


Notice anything special above ? Compare it with screen.


USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
wim      29595  0.0  4.5  48784 46116 ?        Ss    2014   3:49 SCREEN -c mscreen


The tmux session has 8 open windows and 10000 history limit. (set -g history-limit 10000)
The screen session has 39 open windows and 10000 history limit (defscrollback 5000)

So, tmux seems to be using an awful lot of memory. Two times more than screen, for a 'lighter' session setup.

A quick google showed that other people were having the same issues

My first thought was, 'memoryleak', so I checked the code, but everything seemed to be free'd correctly.

I joined the #tmux channel on freenode for some help and got told that it's a specific glibc (linux) issue. Although the memory was free'd, Glibc wasn't releasing it back to the OS.

But you could force it by using malloc_trim(0). And maybe you could use specific glibc environment variables to control memory allocation behaviour to also emulate malloc_trim().

Too much time googling and testing was wasted, I couldn't get it too work, the memory wasn't getting released back to the OS.

So I made a small patch to tmux which
- calls malloc_trim(0) when a window gets destroyed
- also free's memory when you clear your history manually in a window (and also call malloc_trim())

The patch works for me but YMMV

I tried to get this patch into upstream tmux, but was told: 'It's up to glibc to decide how malloc works'.

PS: if you set history-limit 0, tmux actually uses less memory than screen (and doesn't grow), but ofcourse you don't have a scrollback ;-)