tmux vs zellij: 100-Pane Split Render Speed Benchmark

Why 100 Panes?

Most terminal multiplexer benchmarks test normal use cases — 2-4 splits, a few tabs, maybe a dozen panes at most. But what happens when you push these tools to their limits? I ran tmux and zellij with 100 panes simultaneously to see which one handles extreme layouts better.

The motivation came from a debugging session where I needed to monitor 80+ microservice logs in real-time. Sure, you could aggregate logs, but sometimes you just want every container's stderr visible at a glance. That's when I discovered that terminal multiplexers don't all scale the same way.

Photo by Piotr Arnoldes on Pexels

Test Setup: Creating 100 Panes Programmatically

Both tmux and zellij support scripted pane creation, but the APIs differ significantly. Here's the tmux version:

bash
#!/bin/bash
# tmux_100panes.sh
SESSION="stress-test"
tmux new-session -d -s "$SESSION" -x 300 -y 100

for i in {1..99}; do
  if [ $((i % 2)) -eq 0 ]; then
    tmux split-window -h -t "$SESSION" "top -b -n 1000"
  else

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*Continue reading the full article on [TildAlice](https://tildalice.io/tmux-vs-zellij-100-pane-benchmark/)*