A lot of the time I'm developing on a remote server using VSCode Remote-SSH. I mostly love it. But! It consumes a lot of memory. And not only that. At times it gets stuck in some infinite loop or such, and ends up consuming all memory on the machine, preventing all traffic. Takes a few minutes for the OS to finally kill it, so I can get back in. I'm pretty this is happening due to large collections of symlinks (the subprocess eating up the memory is rg). But also just JavaScript editing at times launches up a bunch of ts-servers consuming everything and more.
This is super scary, if I'm poking around on the prod server.
Looking for alternatives. Zed is on my list.
https://fly.io/blog/vscode-ssh-wtf/
Any idea if zed does things differently?
EDIT: Scrap that. After a while it starts running at 100% CPU on my macbook. I'm editing a small, simple PHP remotely over SSH. I haven't yet tested if it only happens with remote editing. Too bad... Well, at least it didn't trash the server like VSCode.
EDIT: Logs showed it was trying to do some auto suggestions every few seconds, but failed due to missing credentials. Didn't seem like something that would eat up 100%, but after disabling all AI features (I'm glad there was an option for this), the problem disappeared, and I'm happy with Zed again.
I'm a support engineer at Zed - would you like to pair for 15mins so we can file a proper report?
For auth one can use Caddy and basic auth. Yes it takes a bit of work but it isn’t that bad. Plus zero subscription costs if your VPS is a Raspberry
The difference with exe.dev is multiple VMs. I have over 20 now with isolated apps, branches of the same app, etc.
Agreed, it takes a few hours to set up everything. But just did it with Claude the other day, and I was up and running in no time! :-)
Had to shut everything down, list the port, and then reconnect. A big pain when other tools just automatically figure out what needs to be forwarded, or just let you specify arbitrary ports at runtime.
For many apps the weird experimental version is all there is. Call it vibe coding or experiments or non-critical tools. These may not even have a GitHub repo. I trust local git and the exe.dev disks.
Then for serious apps the above is the same shape for development branches. Spin up a VM in a few seconds with the code checked out and running online and editable over an SSH mount is the magic.
Then that turns into a PR on GitHub and a normal review then CI/CD to staging and prod takes over.
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Re...