Hello all. 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.
I have seen runaway processes that not only run a long time, but also start to consume CPU resources.
As far as I am concerned, any runaway process will eventually take over as much as it can.
I had an issue just today with a process that was use 200% of 2 CPUs on my server. It had been running for 91000+ minutes. It wasn't a zombie or anything like that. It just "ranaway". I killed it and restarted, then everything was okay.
I can't really explain why these things happen. Maybe they get dropped by the OS or lose some ability to be managed by the OS and then instead of being "timesliced" and allocated CPU resources, they start to take over resources without permission.
I have seen a similiar problem in elvis (vi clone) when I had been editing a document and got disconnected from the system. I log back in and start again and elvis is going nuts. I don't know why. Kill elvis and delete the elvis/vi temp related file and it is all good.
I would look for any vi temp files and eliminate them if they exist.