Ubuntu: Process vfs-worker taking all CPU resources

Question

My Cloud9 (Ubuntu-based cloud IDE) began to be unresponsive after I tried to save some files (they didn't save to my cloud workspace). It shows 100% CPU utilization and a process that takes all CPU power.

Here is the error from which the 100% CPU utilizing vfs-worker process starts:

Failed to write to 'settings.py'. Failed saving file ! : djangoserver/djangoserver/settings.py ERR: Error: EACCES, open '/home/ubuntu/workspace/djangoserver/djangoserver/settings.py'.

Rights in djangoserver directory with djangoserver/settings.py:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Nov 25 15:21 __init__.py
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 147 Nov 25 15:33 __init__.pyc
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1990 Nov 25 15:21 settings.py
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2174 Nov 25 15:33 settings.pyc
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 303 Nov 25 15:21 urls.py
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 399 Nov 25 15:21 wsgi.py

Rights in the parent directory:

enter image description here

The process causing this is:

vfs-worker {"pi

and it seems to be associated with the IDE (after killing it it displays Reconnecting... message). After killing it the process restarts itself with a different PID.

This might as well be a bug in the IDE based on the misspelled name. I tried restarting the whole IDE, but it comes back right after restart.

Before I dismiss this as a bug I would like to see if there could be other causes to this. I also have Python module virtualenv installed (not sure what it does) as a requirement for adding MongoDB support to Django. This might also be caused by virtualenv, which I added just recently according to this tutorial.

Answer 1

I noticed the error was affecting only djangoserver directory in my workspace, the steps I took were:

1. Delete djangoserver. Even after deletion of the djangoserver folder I could see the IDE displaying a different error and still crashing on 100% CPU load:

Failed to delete folder ‘testenv'. stderr maxBuffer exceeded..

2. Restart workspace. By doing this the whole problem was solved.

Not sure what it was, it may be a bug in the IDE.