I'm seeing this occasionally now.. on catalina. For a while all will be ok with a dozen or so tmux sessions open and then the fan will come on and when I look, "top -ocpu" will show iTerm2 as being the highest consumer of CPU. with numbers between 50 and 115% of a cpu.
The way to stop it is to detach all the tmux sessions, and restart iterm2. Then things go back down to 10% or so after reattaching the sessions. If you want more information I'm happy to catch it next time this happens but you need to be really specific as to what you want and how I get to it... (menu entries or commands).