alt Hacker NewsThat's a shame to hear. I had to give up on Ghostty because of its memory leak issue. Granted, it was on an 8GB system, but that should be enough to run a terminal without memory exhaustion a few times a week. Foot has been rock solid, even though it lacks some of Ghostty's niceties.
Replies
mi_lk • today at 3:58 AM
I’m sure they would appreciate a report as it doesn’t seem that it can be reproduced yet
favflam • today at 4:09 AM
btw, is it me or is there any justification for anyone including a developer to run more than 8GB of RAM for a laptop? I don't see functionality as having changed in the last 15 years.
For me, only Rust compilation necessitates more RAM. But, I assume devs just do RAM heavy dev work on a server over ssh.
➕ show 6 replies
Note that this is an active discussion where we're trying to get to a point of clarity where we can promote to an issue (when it is actionable). The discussion is open and this is the system working as intended!
I want to clarify though that there isn't a known widespread "memory leak issue." You didn't say "widespread", but just in case that is taken by anyone else. :) To clarify, there are a few challenges here:
1. The report at hand seems to affect a very limited number of users (given the lack of reports and information about them). There are lots of X meme posts about Ghostty in the macOS "Force Close" window using a massive amount of RAM but that isn't directly useful because that window also reports all the RAM _child processes_ are using (e.g. if you run a command in your shell that consumes 100 GB of RAM, macOS reports it as Ghostty using 100 GB of RAM). And the window by itself also doesn't tell us what you were doing in Ghostty. It farms good engagement, though.
2. We've run Ghostty on Linux under Valgrind in a variety of configurations (the full GUI), we run all of Ghostty's unit tests under Valgrind in CI for every commit, and we've run Ghostty on macOS with the Xcode Instruments leak checker in a variety of configurations and we haven't yet been able to find any leaks. Both of these run fully clean. So, the "easy" tools can't find it.
3. Following point 1 and 2, no maintainer familiar with the codebase has ever seen leaky behavior. Some of us run a build of Ghostty, working full time in a terminal, for weeks, and memory is stable.
4. Our Discord has ~30K users, and within it, we only have one active user who periodically gets a large memory issue. They haven't been able to narrow this down to any specific reproduction and they aren't familiar enough with the codebase to debug it themselves, unfortunately. They're trying!
To be clear, I 100% believe that there is some kind of leak affecting some specific configuration of users. That's why the discussion is open and we're soliciting input. I even spent about an hour today on the latest feedback (posted earlier today) trying to use that information to narrow it down. No dice, yet.
If anyone has more info, we'd love to find this. :)