I can consistently make vim become a runaway process by loading it in a window and closing the window in which it was created. This happens either locally or remotely (either in a xterm/gnome-terminal or through a putty/ssh session). I've seen this for several versions of redhat (I think since 6.2, but I'm not sure). I'm using the latest version right now, 6.1-18.7x.2. It only seems to happen to the vim-enhanced version, however, and not vim-minimal. Rebuilding from the src.rpm produces the same affect.
I can do the same, in fact we have several general login servers which consistently get loaded up with runnaway vim and xemacs processes both of which seem to hang in the same consistent manner. All you gotta do is ssh into a box, start vim, close your terminal without quitting vim... I've seen this on 7.2-9.0 machines...
never mind just found this on the vim page: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/vimfaq2html3.pl 29.9. When I kill the xterm running Vim, the Vim process continues to run and takes up a lot of CPU (99%) time. Why is this happening? When Vim is built with support for Python interface, you will have this problem. This is a known problem with a python thread library and Vim. To solve this problem, use a Vim binary built without the Python interface. For more information, read :help +python :help python Doesn't look like there is a fix yet... Cheers, Tim
*** Bug 91629 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 88458 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 83177 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 78350 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 61141 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This is happening to us, too. dkl, can we get a fixed vim built and released? Or perhaps a fixed Python thread library if vim +python is too useful to lose? Thanks.