vim sessions use 100% CPU

[n1zyy]

I'm wondering if this is a common issue or not. Every now and then our server will seem really sluggish, so I'll hop in over ssh, and top shows that a vim process uses 99.9% of our CPU, bringing our load average to 1.5 or so.

The crazy vim processes seem to be after someone's been editing something (with vim); I don't think they're randomly starting. Does anyone know what causes this? Is there a way to proactively stop these, rather than just killing them? (They won't respond to signal 15; you have to use 9.)

[dgbaker]

It's usually because someone does not exit vim properly, you'll need to educate them on the proper way to exit vim.

[n1zyy]

It's usually because someone does not exit vim properly, you'll need to educate them on the proper way to exit vim.

They usually come from one of the administrators (most other users don't even know what SSH is). He definitely mastered the :wq thing several years ago.

In fact... how do you uncleanly exit vi? Pounding Ctrl+C, Ctrl+D, or Ctrl+Q repeatedly didn't do anything.

[dgbaker]

CTRL+Z and forgetting about will cause this.

Losing your SSH session in the middle of editing will cause this.

DO - locate .swp to find all files that have been edit by vim and not exited cleanly.



Those are some other ways.