stream-video --format mjpeg grows without bound (~5–7 GB/min) on macOS 26.5.2 #72

Environment

• AXe 1.8.0 (Homebrew tap cameroncooke/axe)
• macOS 26.5.2 (25F84), Mac mini (Mac16,10, Apple silicon, 16 GB)
• Xcode 26.x, iOS Simulator (iPhone 17 Pro runtime)

Command

axe stream-video --udid <UDID> --format mjpeg --fps 12 --quality 85 --scale .67

stdout piped to a Node process that reads continuously (flowing mode, never blocks), stderr drained.

What happens
The axe process's physical footprint grows linearly from the first frame and never plateaus. Measured with footprint(1):

• ~110 MB/s sustained (44 MB → ~690 MB in 9 s)
• 41 GB → 45 GB over 15 s at the 7-minute mark
• A system stackshot caught it at 48.65 GB resident after 12 minutes, at which point WindowServer became unresponsive, watchdogd killed it, and macOS force-logged-out the graphical session.

ps RSS stays small (~280 MB) because the growth is in compressed/swapped pages; footprint -p <pid> or top's MEM column shows the real number.

Expected
Footprint stays roughly constant once streaming; frames already written to stdout should be released.

Notes

• The consumer keeps stdout drained, so this doesn't look like pipe backpressure on our side.
• Not tested with other --format values or fps; happy to run a specific comparison if useful.
• Workaround in our tool: poll footprint and recycle the process past a limit.

I can share the full stackshot (WindowServer …userspace_watchdog_timeout.spin) privately if that helps.