Processes taking over pc

[preacher]

Hello all. This is a technical question for you linux heads. I was on my pc last night when I noticed that my hard drive light was on and when I typed in "uptime" I recieved some crazy load averages. load average: 3.30, 3.07, 2.95. Anyway I type in "top" to see what processes are being the resource hogs and im surprised as hell to see that one copy of vi is using 49% of system resources, while another one is using 44%. I typed in "kill pid", but it wouldnt work on the runaway processes, and I had to "kill -9 pid" them. Anyone ever had a similar problem? Right now everything is back to normal.

[Calum]

my sister has just installed linux 2.4 with KDE recently, and she noticed her hard drive gets thrashed, she asked me and i could not tell her why, i also have noticed this happening sometimes, with my scenario, the % of CPU use slowly creeps up, but i usually get irritated and kill the process before it gets to about 20%...

what is the story?

[TheQuirk]

same. but it's usually two of them ,taking 34% or so. it doesn't happened to me in KDE3, though. Maybe there's a connection?

[preacher]

Funny thing is that at the time I wasnt even using X.

[TheQuirk]

that's pretty odd

[voidmain]

What distro and version are you using?  I don't recall ever having this problem.  On occassion I have had certain versions of certain apps with memory leaks but killing/restarting them has always solved the problem.  If you abruptly disconnect from your server while editing a file in vi/vim it will stay running but I have not noticed it to eat up CPU cycles.  And I have always been able to kill that vi/vim session (as the user that the process is running under) without the "-9" and then when I start another vim session I use the "-r" (recovery) param and have never lost anything I was working on, always puts me right back where I was.  This happens to me often when editing files on remote servers via ssh connection over the internet..

[dbl221]

I had a similar problem with VIM (gvim) when I didn't close it down correctly...the vim process chewed up lots of cpu cycles even though the gvim session was not open.

I had to kill -9 pid and have never had a repeat of the problem when I shut down vim/gvim with the usual :q! or :wq.

Using vim version 6.0.19.  Hope this helps