Anyone that has used SSH, Tmux or Screen for a while will have inevitably dumped excessive output to their terminal. Depending on the size of the output you may have experienced the dreaded lockup. That horrible realization seconds after you hit the command where signals just stop working and you just have to sit there and wait for your terminal to catch up.
There is a piece of remote connection software called Mosh that I’ve been told handles this pretty well, but I don’t yet trust its security model and it doesn’t prevent the same thing from happening locally.
This is especially bad if you’re working in a multi-pane tmux window as it’s locks up all the terminals in the same window, and prevents you from changing to the other windows.
I’ve had this issue happen to me one too many times but never thought of looking for a solution until a friend of mine, Gabe Koss, made a passing comment along the lines of “Too bad tmux can’t rate limit the output of a terminal”.
A quick search through the doc and two relatively recent configuration options popped out doing exactly what I was looking for (c0-change-internal, and c0-change-trigger). Googling around for good values, left me wanting. A lot of people were recommending setting the values to 100 and 250 respectively; These are the defaults and since I still experience the issue are clearly not working for me.
To set the variables to something more reasonable I had to understand what they were doing. A ‘C0’ sequence is one that modifies the screen beyond a normal character sequence, think newlines, carriage returns, backspaces. According to the tmux man page, the trigger will catch if the number of c0 sequences per millisecond exceeds the number in the configuration file, at which point it will start displaying an update once every interval number of milliseconds.
I can’t see faster than my eye’s refresh rate so that seems like a decent starting point. According to Wikipedia the human eye/brain interface can process 10-12 images per second but we can notice ‘choppiness’ below 48 FPS. Since I won’t be reading anything flying by that fast I settled on a maximum rate of 10 FPS updated in my shell, or an interval of ‘100ms’.
For the trigger I was significantly less scientific, I dropped the trigger by 50, reloaded my tmux configuration, cat’d a large file and tested whether I could immediately kill the process and move between panes. I finally settled on a value of ‘75’ for the trigger rate. It does make the output seem a little choppy but it is significantly nicer to not kill my terminal.