Anybody Seen VIM runaway!

Happened to me yesterday on a brand new RH 7.3 machine -- don't know why -- hope it doesn't happen again....

 

I would think it would happen if someone vi's a very large file. I happened to intentionally vi a 500M file the other day and got very high util opening and writing the file.

 

doesn't even matter about the file size.

Vim runs away into the sunset and will run at 99.9% until it's killed..... a sentry program listening for such insanity is something you should definitely employ on a shared box. At least until they fix this, and detach the process from memory if a user is disconnected or somehow logs out without halting the lovely Vim session.

This would never have happened with the sexy as hell core VI

:p

 

random?

I have experienced this at random intervals from time to time on all my cpanel machines... never seen the problem outside of my cpanel machines.. so either my other machines don't get enough usage, or it's something cpanel specific... doubtful it's related to cpanel.. but who knows.

Anyhow, definately recommend writing a script that checks for it and kills it off.. just be careful not to kill real vi instances that users are working with that happen to be in startup mode, which can shoot the usage up to 99% for just a second.

 

This has happened to us 3-4 times in the last year, a couple of which actually took the server to its knees. Vim shouldn't do that

 

This happened to me today and I killed the process but I am concerned that this happens. Is there a way to disable VIM?

Thanks!
Curt

 

Cron script to take care of the issue.....

Guys / Gals,

Here's the script I've created to eliminate the problem on our servers -- I've called it killvim and put it in the /scripts directory and scheduled it as a cron job to run periodically.... Use it if you care to.....


#!/usr/bin/perl

`ps -ef | grep & vim & | grep & 1 & | grep & ? & & /tmp/vim.$$`;

open(VIMTHRDS, &&/tmp/vim.$$&
while(&VIMTHRDS&amp {
my ($x1, $x2) = split();
chomp $x2;
my ($pid, $trash) = split(/ /, $x2);
if (length(&$pid&amp & 0) {
`kill -9 $pid`;
}
}
close(VIMTHRDS);

`rm -f /tmp/vim.$$`;

 

Shaun,

The triple grep command should prevent attached vim processes from being killed (note the grep for both & 1 & and & ? &amp. Someone who knows pattern matching in perl better than I could probably rewrite this better, but if you look at the vim processes that are running and attached vs. those that are no longer attached to a session, you'll see that this does appear to work....

Comments??

But hey your approach is worth investigating -- I think we both agree that once it happens to ya', you'll be looking for a fix!!!

 

Man a post from the dead. Has anyone figured out what to do about this?

Really need some help here same thing happening to us on 2 servers.

cPanel.net Support Ticket Number:

 

Have you made the changes mentioned above?

cPanel.net Support Ticket Number:

 

the vim reaper

I'm seeing a lot of need for this (including on my own servers) but not a lot of solutions. So I wrote one - a shell script called "the vim reaper" (bwa ha ha ha). If it's useful, help yourself:

http://www.birdhouse.org/blog/software/vimreaper.txt