Problem: Chroma process leak / zombie chains —— Trove problem library

What you will run into

After long-term use, memory/process counts slowly bloat; ps shows multiple leftover chroma processes and the machine gets laggier.

You think you're just opening too many sessions - actually it's missing process-tree cleanup in old versions (upstream Issues #2959/#3137): when the worker exits, it doesn't clean up the child process tree, and leftovers accumulate.

Why this happens

claude-mem's worker spawns chroma (vector DB) and other child processes. Old versions didn't correctly clean the whole process tree on exit/restart, leaving child processes behind (zombie chains).

v13.16.1, released 2026-08-25, fixed process-tree cleanup - upgrading the plugin is the primary fix, not fighting it by hand-killing processes.

Leftover processes are fundamentally a broken process-tree cleanup chain: the worker spawns chroma and other children directly, and old versions only reaped themselves on exit without recursively killing the child tree.

The abandoned chroma does not exit on its own — it is a long-running service, gets adopted by init after the parent dies, and keeps holding memory and ports.

So "the machine gets slower over time" is not an illusion: every session exit leaks a few children, accumulating linearly.

pkill -f is the fallback that matches the whole chain by command-line pattern, but the real fix has to add tree-kill on the exit path — which is exactly what v13.16.1 does.

Step by step

1. Upgrade the plugin (root fix) — Required

npm_config_registry=https://registry.npmmirror.com npm install -g claude-mem
claude-mem update

v13.16.1 (2026-08-25 release) fixes process-tree cleanup.

2. Clean leftover processes — Required

pkill -f chroma; pkill -f claude-mem

3. Restart the worker — Required

claude-mem start && claude-mem status

How to confirm it works

ps aux | grep -c chroma; claude-mem status

After restart, leftover chroma count is zero and the worker is ready = success (no more accumulation after upgrading).

Other environments

Symptom

After long-term use, memory/processes bloat and multiple leftover chroma processes appear.

Cause

Missing process-tree cleanup in old versions (upstream Issues #2959/#3137).

Solution

1. Upgrade the plugin to v13.16.1 (2026-08-25 release fixes process-tree cleanup).
2. Clean leftover processes manually, then restart the worker.