vi pegs the cpu

Is it common for an unattended vi session to peg the CPU to 100% over the course of a few hours? For example, a user logs in, vi's a file and after a period of inactivity the session timesout, leaving the vi PID still running, but orphaned.

Thanks.

Hmmm, so you are basically saying that someone was using Vi and then left it open and eventually the system kicked them off but left the Vi session open on the server... which at this point it pegs out your cpu?

The only case in which I would see something like Vi or Pico pegging out the CPU is if someone was trying to open a very very large file. Other than that I have never experienced myself the problem you are having, and it does not sound very normal

You might read this link though, I have found a few others who have had the problems you are having. Apparently Vi is getting stuck in a loop possibly

http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-sparc ... /0000.html

Here he says "However, at times it appears that if a telnet connection is dropped and you are in the middle of vi, the vi command goes into a loop consuming all of the CPU. I was wondering if anybody else encountered a similar problem or has"

Sounds to me like the exact problem you are having.

I have not found a solution yet, but you might try downloading and installing the latest version of Vi if you have not already. That itself may fix your problem if in fact the problem is with Vi

Thanks for looking into this.

My hosting provider has disabled SSH access for me because of this. So I really can't do any analytics. I'm not sure if my shell is killed, or hung, or what.

I'm negotiating with them right now about access. Based on the link you sent, I'm making the same suggestion...write a cronjob that looks for and kills a user PID with >x% CPU utilization.

thanks again.