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Discussion on: How much of a memory impact do tabs in my terminal have?

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Ben Halpern

Processes like kernel_task are pretty opaque and take up a lot of memory sometimes. Terminal also has a pretty large impact occasionally but I'm not entirely sure how to ingest what is responsible for what. Finder can have a big impact, but I'm not always sure why.

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David J Eddy

Agreed, why does finder eat up 25%+ CPU? Ever since I found htop many years back it has been my go-to for process monitoring.

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Adrian B.G.

htop rocks, and do not forget to press H to group the threads.

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Scott Tadman

Do you use anything like iStat Menus? It's a fantastic little toolbar application that can show you when things are spinning out of control, like you forgot you had a VM running, heavy disk I/O, or memory pressure.

Terminal is pretty low-key, but sometimes sub-processes of Terminal get lumped into the Terminal.app memory footprint in some visualizations. That means running a Docker VM can make it seem like Terminal is a huge hog.

The biggest pain is scroll-back buffers, but that's only a factor if you have them set to unlimited and are doing something like tail -f on a very busy log file.