[BUG] Closing Terminal Tab Does Not Close Claude -> Excessive Memory Usage
Resolved 💬 6 comments Opened Mar 31, 2026 by winrid Closed May 10, 2026
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?
Closing a Konsole tab with Claude running puts it into a "stopped" state but it never exits. Here is the investigation using Claude itself. It says it's not handling SIGHUP properly. Claude suggested I file a bug report against itself :)
what is taking so much memory on my system?
● Bash(free -h)
⎿ total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 30Gi 23Gi 3.7Gi 2.2Gi 5.8Gi 6.9Gi
Swap: 511Mi 511Mi 236Ki
● Bash(ps aux --sort=-%mem | head -30)
⎿ USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
winrid 1747166 373 9.1 4969440 2937456 ? Sl 23:09 4:16 /home/winrid/Android/Sdk/emulator/qemu/linux-x86_64/qemu-system-x86_64 -avd tiny_device -gpu swiftshader_indirect -no-snapshot-load -no-audio
winrid 1732171 102 7.1 10424272 2301044 ? Ssl 22:59 11:16 /home/winrid/.sdkman/candidates/java/17.0.17-tem/bin/java --add-opens=java.base/java.lang=ALL-UNNAMED --add-opens=java.base/java.lang.invoke=ALL-UNNAMED --add-
… +40 lines (ctrl+o to expand)
● You're using 23GB of 30GB RAM and swap is completely full. Here's the breakdown:
┌─────────────────────────┬────────┬───────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Category │ ~RSS │ Notes │
├─────────────────────────┼────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Claude Code instances │ ~6.3GB │ ~17 instances, most in stopped (Tl) state │
├─────────────────────────┼────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Android emulator (qemu) │ ~2.9GB │ tiny_device emulator │
├─────────────────────────┼────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Gradle daemons (2) │ ~2.7GB │ Java 17 + Java 25, both at -Xmx2048m │
├─────────────────────────┼────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ TypeScript servers (2) │ ~2.4GB │ tsserver for two projects │
├─────────────────────────┼────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Firefox + tabs │ ~2.0GB │ Main process + 3 content processes │
├─────────────────────────┼────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Kotlin compile daemon │ ~500MB │ Idle, 2hr auto-shutdown │
├─────────────────────────┼────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ plasmashell │ ~684MB │ KDE desktop │
├─────────────────────────┼────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ RustDesk │ ~341MB │ Remote desktop │
├─────────────────────────┼────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Node app │ ~297MB │ node app in pts/36 │
└─────────────────────────┴────────┴───────────────────────────────────────────┘
The biggest culprit is the ~17 Claude Code processes (~6.3GB combined). Most are backgrounded/stopped (Tl state) from previous sessions. You can reclaim a lot by killing the stopped ones:
# Kill all stopped (Tl) claude processes
kill 1917194 2481578 4104275 1359191 3379644 2214740 456267 1798161 2007339 1361939 2290664 3247639
You could also stop the Gradle daemons if you're not actively building:
gradle --stop
❯ but i only have 4 claude code instances running? are they not closing after i close the konsole tab?
● Right - the 4 active ones are in Sl+ state (attached to a terminal). The other ~13 are in Tl state (stopped by signal, not terminated). When you close a Konsole tab, the shell sends SIGHUP to child processes, but it seems Claude is
catching/ignoring it and getting stopped instead of exiting. So they just pile up as zombies eating ~300-400MB each.
Kill the stopped ones now:
kill 1917194 2481578 4104275 1359191 3379644 2214740 456267 1798161 2007339 1361939 2290664 3247639
To prevent this going forward, you could add to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc:
# Ensure child processes get killed on shell exit
shopt -s huponexit # bash
Or if you want to be more aggressive, you could add a Konsole profile pre-close hook, but huponexit should help for most cases. If that still doesn't work, the issue may be that Claude is trapping SIGHUP - in which case you'd want to
file an issue at https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues.
❯ i ran that, memory looks the same?
● Bash(free -h)
⎿ total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 30Gi 23Gi 3.5Gi 2.2Gi 6.1Gi 7.0Gi
Swap: 511Mi 511Mi 52Ki
● Bash(ps aux --sort=-%mem | head -10)
⎿ USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
winrid 1747166 255 9.2 4926280 2969092 ? Sl 23:09 7:13 /home/winrid/Android/Sdk/emulator/qemu/linux-x86_64/qemu-system-x86_64 -avd tiny_device -gpu swiftshader_indirect -no-snapshot-load -no-audio
winrid 1732171 90.0 7.1 10426184 2317500 ? Ssl 22:59 11:25 /home/winrid/.sdkman/candidates/java/17.0.17-tem/bin/java --add-opens=java.base/java.lang=ALL-UNNAMED --add-opens=java.base/java.lang.invoke=ALL-UNNAMED --add-
… +23 lines (ctrl+o to expand)
● The stopped Claude processes are gone from the top list, but Linux doesn't always release memory immediately - it keeps it as cache. The "available" column (7.0GB) is what actually matters for whether you'll run out.
Let me check if they're truly gone and what's still eating memory:
● Bash(ps aux | grep '[c]laude' | wc -l && ps aux | grep '[c]laude' | awk '{sum += $6} END {printf "Total Claude RSS: %.0f MB\n", sum/1024}')
⎿ 32
Total Claude RSS: 9288 MB
● Bash(ps aux | grep '[c]laude' | awk '{printf "%s %s %s %.0fMB %s\n", $2, $8, $9, $6/1024, $11}' | sort -t'M' -k1 -rn)
⎿ 4104275 Tl Mar29 401MB claude
3974769 Tl Mar29 263MB claude
3626766 Tl Mar29 224MB claude
… +29 lines (ctrl+o to expand)
● They didn't die - kill sends SIGTERM but stopped (Tl) processes can't process signals until resumed. They need kill -9 (SIGKILL). There are 28 stopped Claude processes eating ~9GB total.
Your 4 active ones are PIDs: 1642081, 1718654, 1741666, 1748365. Let's force-kill the rest:
● Bash(ps aux | grep '[c]laude' | awk '$8 == "Tl" {print $2}' | xargs kill -9)
⎿ (No output)
● Bash(free -h)
⎿ total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 30Gi 16Gi 10Gi 2.2Gi 6.2Gi 14Gi
Swap: 511Mi 364Mi 147Mi
● 7GB freed - down from 23GB to 16GB used, and available went from 7GB to 14GB. Swap is draining too.
The problem is that Claude processes in stopped (Tl) state ignore SIGTERM - they need SIGKILL. And closing a Konsole tab is stopping them rather than terminating them. This is likely a Claude Code bug where it doesn't handle SIGHUP
properly. Worth reporting at https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues. What Should Happen?
claude should exit and release memory
Error Messages/Logs
Steps to Reproduce
- open claude in Konsole
- close the tab
- claude does not exit
Claude Model
Opus
Is this a regression?
I don't know
Last Working Version
_No response_
Claude Code Version
2.1.88 (Claude Code)
Platform
Anthropic API
Operating System
Ubuntu/Debian Linux
Terminal/Shell
Other
Additional Information
I'm not sure why Konsole is not an option under Terminal/Shell. It's included with most KDE distros.
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