Small issue with recursivebrowser

[kbuckleys]

Hello everyone. I'm new to this community, but I did try to look for anything pertaining to my issue here before making this post. So to cut it short; recursivebrowser seems to amass a crazy amount of RAM whenever rofi is open. I understand that it's due to the large volume of data on my home directory where I set the directory to.

My question is; is there anything I should consider changing in my config or is this a known issue since recursivebrowser is still relatively experimental? In addition, I tried to minimize the impact by filtering out some unneeded entries like so: filter-regex: "(.*cache.*|.*\\.o)";

I'd appreciate any help.

[DaveDavenport]

Its not really a bug, but kinda a side effect of how it works. It needs scan your directory and store the filenames and info to be able to search/slow this..
(For each file it finds, it stores the name, the path, the type, timestamp, etc. once visible, it fetches the icon and shows that).
This takes memory, no real way around this without destroying performance.

I am not sure what you consider 'crazy', but this can grow quickly. For me for 850k files its around 390mb total.
So that is around 400 bytes per file.. given the depth of the directory tree this is not impossible.

I can see some ways to optimize this, but this can be tricky and causes slow downs, its a tradeoff.

[kbuckleys]

Memory usage jumps to up to 9GB if I let rofi open for roughly 30 seconds, give or take. It'll keep going on forever if I don't close it. I only have around 150k files in my home directory. I'd pretty much call this crazy. Is it because I have show-hidden set to true in filebrowser by any chance?

configuration {
	  modi: "combi,drun,recursivebrowser,filebrowser";
    show-icons: false;
    display-combi: "COMBI";
    display-drun: "DRUN";
    display-recursivebrowser: "FILES";
    display-filebrowser: "BROWSER";
	  drun-display-format: "{name}";
	  window-format: "{c} · {t}";
    kb-accept-entry: "Return";
    kb-remove-to-eol: "";
    recursivebrowser {
        directory: "~";
        cancel-returns-1: true;
        filter-regex: "(.*cache.*|.*\\.o)";
        command: "kitty -e nvim";
    }
    filebrowser {
        show-hidden: true;
        command: "thunar";
    }
}

In addition, sometimes rofi's process persists in the background until I manually terminate it. I don't know the cause of that one either. If you see anything out of the ordinary in my config, please let me know.

capture_2025-09-11_08-41-25.mp4

Here's a video to give you an idea of what I mean. The memory usage will just keep climbing indefinitely for as long as I have rofi open, and at times I'd have to terminate it manually.

[DaveDavenport]

I think you have a loop somewhere in your directory structure and it currently does not detect loops.
This is something that should be fixed.

[kbuckleys]

I figured as much. But is it something to address on my end or yours?

[DaveDavenport]

ideally in rofi.

[kbuckleys]

I mean is there something I should change on my end, or does this need to be patched? In other words, should I wait for a rofi update?

[DaveDavenport]

I've added some code to git, that should check for loops.

[kbuckleys]

Just gave it a go. Works beautifully. Rofi now barely exceeds the 200 MB mark.
Thank you for your lightning fast responses and solution. You're awesome.

Can I expect an update to the binary sometime soon?

[DaveDavenport]

Rofi does not ship binaries.

[kbuckleys]

I thought the one I fetched from pacman (not the AUR) was a binary. Anyway, thank you.

[DaveDavenport]

It is, but its created/shipped by archlinux, I have no control over that.
I do not provide build/packages, better leave that to the experts at the different distributions.

The next rofi release will not be soon I suspect, as we just released 2.0.0. I am hoping for some more feedback before making another release.

In archlinux you might be able to use rofi-git from AUR? that should get you the dev version.