tmux flow control
flow-control, ssh, tmux
Solution
tmux 1.7 and later include a kind of rate limiting. It might help if the output you are dealing with is normal “scrolly” output (lots of normal lines, not (e.g.) a huge base64 encoded block).
Two options control this rate limiting: `c0-change-trigger`, and `c0-change-interval`. Basically, if tmux sees more than `c0-change-trigger` of certain C0 control characters (e.g. backspace, linefeed, carriage return) in 1 millisecond, then it will deferring further updates to the pane for `c0-change-interval` milliseconds. The defaults are 250 such C0 characters in 1 millisecond will stop pane drawing for 100 milliseconds.
Problem
I'm ssh'ing into a machine running Ubuntu 12.04, and using tmux 1.6, on an ADSL link (8Mbps/1Mbps down/up). When there's lots of fast terminal output, the link gets saturated and completely unresponsive, and I can't switch tmux windows or anything, and have to kill ssh. Is there some tmux setting to prevent this? I've seen some patches but it's not clear what they do.