tmux rate-limiting magic against terminal spam/flood lock-ups
Update 2015-11-08: No longer necessary (or even supported in 2.1) - tmux' new "backoff" rate-limiting approach works like a charm with defaults \o/
Had the issue of spammy binary locking-up terminal for a long time, but never bothered to do something about it... until now.
Happens with any terminal I've seen - just run something like this in the shell there:
# for n in {1..500000}; do echo "$spam $n"; done
xterm seem to be one of the most resistant *terms to this, e.g. terminology - much less so, which I guess just means that it's more fancy and hence slower to draw millions of output lines.
Anyhow, tmuxrc magic:
set -g c0-change-trigger 150 set -g c0-change-interval 100
"man tmux" says that 250/100 are defaults, but it doesn't seem to be true, as just setting these "defaults" explicitly here fixes the issue, which exists with the default configuration.
Fix just limits rate of tmux output to basically 150 newlines (which is like twice my terminal height anyway) per 100 ms, so xterm won't get overflown with "rendering megs of text" backlog, remaining apparently-unresponsive (to any other output) for a while.
Since I always run tmux as a top-level multiplexer in xterm, totally solved the annoyance for me. Just wish I've done that much sooner - would've saved me a lot of time and probably some rage-burned neurons.