Summary
CodexBar appears to leak /bin/zsh and fzf child processes on macOS until the user session gets close to its per-user process limit. Once that happens, unrelated tools start failing to spawn with Resource temporarily unavailable / os error 35.
This looks like a child-process leak, not CPU or memory pressure.
What happened
While CodexBar was running, my shell/build environment started failing to launch new commands. The session was near the per-user process cap:
launchctl limit maxproc
maxproc 2666 4000
ulimit -u
2666
ps -U "$USER" | wc -l
2654
CodexBar itself was PID 581:
ps -Ao pid,ppid,comm | grep CodexBar
581 1 /Applications/CodexBar.app/Contents/MacOS/CodexBar
Its child tree contained a huge number of /bin/zsh processes:
ps -Ao pid,ppid,stat,comm | awk '$1==581 || $2==581'
This returned hundreds of entries like:
581 1 S /Applications/CodexBar.app/Contents/MacOS/CodexBar
663 581 S /bin/zsh
664 581 S /bin/zsh
665 581 S /bin/zsh
...
And zsh / fzf listing showed many nested and orphaned helpers:
ps -Ao pid,ppid,stat,comm | egrep 'zsh|fzf'
Impact
Once the process count got high enough, unrelated commands started failing to spawn, including shells, build tools, and compilers.
Recovery
Killing CodexBar and fzf dropped the process count back to normal:
kill -9 581
pkill -9 fzf
ps -U "$USER" | wc -l
418
After that, command spawning worked normally again.
Expected behavior
CodexBar should not accumulate hundreds of zsh children or orphaned fzf processes, and should clean up helper processes reliably.
Summary
CodexBar appears to leak
/bin/zshandfzfchild processes on macOS until the user session gets close to its per-user process limit. Once that happens, unrelated tools start failing to spawn withResource temporarily unavailable/os error 35.This looks like a child-process leak, not CPU or memory pressure.
What happened
While CodexBar was running, my shell/build environment started failing to launch new commands. The session was near the per-user process cap:
CodexBar itself was PID 581:
Its child tree contained a huge number of /bin/zsh processes:
ps -Ao pid,ppid,stat,comm | awk '$1==581 || $2==581'This returned hundreds of entries like:
And zsh / fzf listing showed many nested and orphaned helpers:
ps -Ao pid,ppid,stat,comm | egrep 'zsh|fzf'Impact
Once the process count got high enough, unrelated commands started failing to spawn, including shells, build tools, and compilers.
Recovery
Killing CodexBar and fzf dropped the process count back to normal:
After that, command spawning worked normally again.
Expected behavior
CodexBar should not accumulate hundreds of zsh children or orphaned fzf processes, and should clean up helper processes reliably.