Bug: Unbounded Memory Growth in Message Store Causing OOM Crashes

[deepak0x]

A memory management issue exists in the message store where messages are accumulated in memory without any upper bound. In active or high-traffic channels, this causes unbounded memory growth, eventually leading to Out-Of-Memory (OOM) crashes, especially on mobile devices.

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Observed Behavior

The setMessages function appends incoming messages directly to the existing message array:

[...state.messages, ...newMessages]

There is no cap or eviction strategy applied. As a result:

• Messages accumulate indefinitely
• Memory usage grows linearly with channel activity
• Old messages are never released from memory

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Why this is not good

• Mobile environments (React Native) have limited memory
• An ever-growing array of message objects prevents garbage collection
• Eventually, the JavaScript heap fills up
• The application crashes with an OOM error

This makes the application unstable and unusable for users in busy channels.

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Steps to Reproduce

1. Connect to a high-volume channel (for example, general).
2. Leave the application running for an extended period (overnight).
3. Monitor memory usage using profiling tools.

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Expected Behavior

The message store should enforce a bounded memory strategy, such as:

• A fixed maximum number of messages (for example, 500)
• Dropping the oldest messages when the limit is exceeded
• Implementing a circular buffer or sliding window approach

This ensures predictable memory usage regardless of channel activity.

[deepak0x]

Hi @Spiral-Memory,
pls let me know your views on this feature...

[Spiral-Memory]

This completely makes sense. We should go with a cache + virtualization strategy to fix this issue: Custom implementation of libraries like Tanstack, react-virtuoso, etc.

As I mentioned in some other issue, this will also fix the jump to message / file / pinned message issue.