Currently I have set the scrollback setting of gnome terminal (Edit -> Profile Preferences -> Scrolling) to 10000 lines. I am tempted to tick Unlimited, but I am afraid this could lead to memory crashes (if I leave a program with lots of output running overnight, I wouldn't like it to crash because of this).
My questions are:
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Are these scrollback lines stored in memory, or are they cached in a file on disk?
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If I change from 10000 to 100000 or to 1 million, am I still safe? What parameters (RAM, free disk space, number of open terminals) I need to take into account)? Is selecting Unlimited safe?
Best Answer
It's apparently stored in deleted files on disk, according to very interesting blog post:
And I'll stress this again: The poster had run
base64 < /dev/urandum
for a while, looking for increases in memory or disk usage - 900MB would be exceptional usage.