Package: screen Version: 4.5.0-6 Severity: normal Dear Maintainer, when I set the screen scrollback buffer to a large number of lines, screen instantly consumes a huge amount of RAM, even when there is no program filling the buffer, yet.
I set the scrollback buffer to 100000000 using the :scrollback command inside screen, assuming this is a good way to set "unlimited" scrollback. The actual output would have been many less lines. Screen instantly consumed more than 20 GB of RAM, causing the computer to hang for a long time. In the best case, screen should not instantly reserve the RAM at all. When it does, it could at least add a warning "Do you really want to increase the buffer, it will consume 20 GB of RAM". I think it is rather unexpected for the average user, that you can shoot yourself into the foot with such a harmless command. with kind regards, Alex -- System Information: Debian Release: 9.9 APT prefers stable APT policy: (900, 'stable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-9-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: sysvinit (via /sbin/init) Versions of packages screen depends on: ii libc6 2.24-11+deb9u4 ii libpam0g 1.1.8-3.6 ii libtinfo5 6.0+20161126-1+deb9u2 screen recommends no packages. Versions of packages screen suggests: pn byobu | screenie | iselect <none> ii ncurses-term 6.0+20161126-1+deb9u2 -- no debconf information
