Scrollback limit... Terminator problem (1592/3174/1.6.0_15-b03-226/Mac OS X 10.5.8/x86_64 x4)

[Jeffrey W. Marrison]

Greetings!

Mac OS X Terminal has been buggy to say the least, and I spent (read:
wasted) a considerable amount of time looking around for a replacement
terminal.

Came across yours, and it certainly appears to do the part...

The issue (feature perhaps?) of the scrollback buffer being
"unlimited" though really causes some grief for long running terminal
sessions.

Myself and my oldschool dev peers commonly leave terminal sessions
open for weeks on end with substantial amounts of output. The abiity
to limit this, and indeed not suffer a performance penalty when the
limit is in fact reached is kinda important unless only using for very
short periods and/or while constantly present to hit cmd-K.

In running some tests with Terminator, continous output in just a
single terminal window goes up to a bit over 1GB of used ram, and then
gets the spinning wheel of death for a 2 count, outputs some data,
then more spinning wheel of death, repeat ad nauseum.

Opening more than one terminal window and doing the same makes it
worse obviously.

Sure seems like you are on the right track though. I appreciate the
"features" of scrollback infinitum and even logging, but the ability
to disable the logging permanently (and not have to repeat disabling
it for every new session), as well as a cap on the buffer size is
kinda important. That a terminal program should use 1GB of ram is a
bit excessive.

I'll keep my eye out for progress, great work though.

Cheers
--Jeff

[Martin Dorey]

Logging can be disabled permanently by making the logs directory unwritable. We don't make it easy because pretty much everyone thinks they want to disable logging. Some seemingly because they think it'll help with the infinite scrollback "feature" but most because they overestimate how much disk space gets used. On the last three hard disks I've had at work, the size of the directory has never made itself worth pruning before the disk failed.

I'm usually quite happy for Terminator to use a gig of ram, though some people with less ram do run it with a change to the argument that controls Java's heap size. When it runs out of memory and kills all my terminals rather than trimming some scrollback, that's when I get upset. If "a cache without an eviction policy is a memory leak", then so is unlimited scrollback. (By that logic, of course, so is unlimited logging but the economics mean that I don't have to care there.) The surf nazis have suffered enough - now the unlimited scrollback "feature" must die. If only it were as easy to do as say.