Sublime Forum

Sublime spawning a cat /dev/urandom process taking 100% cpu (macOS)

#1

Hi, been having this problem for a little while and it hasn’t sorted itself out, so I’m posting about it:

Whenever I start Sublime (v3.2 build 3200 on macOS) I notice my CPU usage goes to 100%.

In my process list I see three processes within the Sublime Text group: cat, tr, and fold.

Screenshot

Processes in ps:

mferrier         96811  89.3  0.0  4269236    972   ??  R     9:10am   7:35.65 cat /dev/urandom
mferrier         96812  24.2  0.0  4268088    848   ??  R     9:10am   1:58.95 tr -dc a-zA-Z0-9
mferrier         96813   8.8  0.0  4268076    856   ??  S     9:10am   0:42.82 fold -w 24

So this leads me to believe something in Sublime is running cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc a-zA-Z0-9 | fold -w 24.

Generally I just KILL the cat process and it stays dead until the next time I start up Sublime Text.

I can only assume one of the installed plugins is doing this for some reason, but I have no idea how to figure out which plugin is misbehaving so I can uninstall it.

Probably deleting and reinstalling Sublime would fix it, or deleting all packages and restarting one at a time until I find which plugin is responsible, but is there any way to figure this out without process of elimination?

Thanks

0 Likes
#2

Unfortunately there’s not; sometimes just looking at the list of packages might remind you of a package that looks like it might be doing something like that. Note that you can just ignore packages and slowly bring them back to narrow it down; you don’t have to uninstall them. Also, reinstallations generally don’t help with something like this because all of the application state is kept in your home directory and a reinstall leaves it alone.

Something else to consider is that on MacOS Sublime will attempt to load your environment variables by invoking your shell. You will see something like this near the top of the console:

environment variables loaded using: /bin/bash -l

If there is anything in your .bashrc or .bash_profile that’s doing something like this, that could be the reason as well.

0 Likes
#3

Sounds like you have mcfly configured incorrectly: Build 3176 high cpu usage plugin_host

1 Like
#4

Thank you so much! That was the problem.

I upgraded mcfly and that fixed it.

0 Likes