May 11, 2026
The Terminal Tea Is Piping Hot
Linux Terminal Memory Usage
One “fancy” app ate 50GB and the comments instantly turned into terminal war
TLDR: A Linux user found one flashy terminal app was gobbling huge amounts of memory, while simpler rivals stayed lean. In the comments, people instantly turned it into a culture war: use tmux, blame GNOME, hype Ghostty, and argue that picking a terminal is practically a personality test.
A longtime Linux user went hunting for the cause of a mysteriously sluggish old computer and uncovered a deliciously petty villain: their terminal app. After noticing the machine had somehow burned through 50GB of swap—basically emergency overflow memory on the hard drive—they found that ten open windows of kitty were the big hog. Swap them out for old-school xterm, and poof: the problem vanished. Cue the internet doing what it does best—turning a useful benchmark into a full-blown identity crisis about which terminal makes you a genius, a dinosaur, or both.
The comment section quickly split into tribes. One camp basically said, why are you opening ten windows at all when tmux/screen lets you cram everything into one? That was the practical dad advice of the thread. Another crowd got excited for the side quest: one reader happily announced they learned they could use timg on a standard macOS terminal without switching apps at all—proof that even in a flame war, someone is just here to save clicks. Then came the spicy platform drama: a commenter took a swipe at GNOME for seemingly replacing a decent terminal with ptyxis, which ranked badly here, calling it peak “replace the working thing with the worse thing” energy. Naturally, someone else parachuted in with the eternal tech-comment move: “Why not try Ghostty?” In other words, the benchmark was about memory, but the real sport was watching everyone argue that terminal choice is actually about lifestyle, taste, and maybe unresolved desktop trauma.
Key Points
- •The article was prompted by a Linux machine with 16GB RAM becoming sluggish because ten kitty instances had filled 50GB of swap.
- •The author used smem to inspect process memory usage through USS, PSS, RSS, and swap metrics.
- •Replacing ten kitty windows with ten xterm windows cleared the previously full swap usage on the affected machine.
- •The author then designed a comparative test of multiple terminal emulators, intending to run them under both Wayland and X11 with the same commands.
- •In the published Openbox/X11 results, st and xterm were among the lightest terminals, while kitty and ptyxis used substantially more memory after commands were run.