[BUG] Huge memory leak, fresh session rapidly climbs in RAM until I kill the session or it OOM's and crashes my system.

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing issues and this hasn't been reported yet
• [x] This is a single bug report (please file separate reports for different bugs)
• [x] I am using the latest version of Claude Code

What's Wrong?

Claude Code is leaking memory immediately after startup on Linux, even in a brand new session with no accumulated chat history. This is not chat context growth. It starts right away in a fresh chat and keeps climbing until the process is killed. In my case it got to about 10.5 GB RSS before I stopped it (this was the second time when i was diagnosing it, first time when I wasn't aware of it it did crash the system).

Environment:

• Claude Code 2.1.71
• Linux
• Node v24.3.0

What I saw from /heapdump:

• Dump taken at about 55.8s uptime
• RSS: 2010611712
• External memory: 1937232481
• ArrayBuffers: 1616106971
• Growth rate: 36020864 bytes/sec (~36 MB/s)
• activeHandles: 0
• activeRequests: 0

Heap snapshot highlights:

• 6099 ArrayBuffer objects totaling about 1539 MB
• 6090 of those are exactly 262288 bytes each
• One live native:Response around 223.16 MB

The important part is that the large retained Response is for downloading the 2.1.72 Linux Claude Code
binary, while the running version is 2.1.71. I noticed similar behavior when running "claude update", it was stuck it "searching for newer versions" while the RAM usage kept climbing.

diagnostics.json

The retained path in the heap goes through:

• IncomingMessage.FetchAPI
• ClientRequest.res
• Writable._currentRequest

The heap also contains updater/native-installer related strings, and the request appears to be using Axios with responseType: "arraybuffer".

Looks like a startup auto-update/native-installer leak, not normal session growth. It seems like the updater is downloading the new binary into memory and retaining the response/chunk buffers instead of releasing them.

I have attached the diagnostic json file generated from heapdump for reference.

What Should Happen?

Claude Code should start a fresh session and auto (or manual) update without rapidly increasing memory usage. Startup update checks/downloads should not retain large binary buffers in memory, and RSS should remain stable instead of continuously climbing until the process is killed.

Error Messages/Logs

Steps to Reproduce

Rough Reproduction:

1. Launch Claude Code 2.1.71 on Linux
2. Start a fresh session
3. Watch RAM climb immediately
4. Run /heapdump

Claude Model

Not sure / Multiple models

Is this a regression?

Yes, this worked in a previous version

Last Working Version

_No response_

Claude Code Version

2.1.71

Platform

Anthropic API

Operating System

Ubuntu/Debian Linux

Terminal/Shell

Terminal.app (macOS)

Additional Information

_No response_