On May 24, 4:27pm, Stephane Chazelas wrote: } } From the straces, we see that zsh is not receiving any SIGCHLD.
If that were the only problem, then opening another shell window and performing "kill -CHLD ..." on the original shell should clear it all up. But as PWS pointed out, the spiking load indicates that either vlc or zsh is actively doing something, which may have to do with the way zsh progates signals, or how it sets the signal masks before forking vlc in the first place. If it's zsh that's looping, then Vincent's stack trace indicates it must be here in zwaitjob: while (!errflag && jn->stat && !(jn->stat & STAT_DONE) && !(interact && (jn->stat & STAT_STOPPED))) { signal_suspend(SIGCHLD); /* job handling stuff elided */ child_block(); } But if *that* were a tight loop, it would mean that signal_suspend() isn't working. It'd be nice to know what process or processes send the load so high; 100% CPU usage is one thing, but 26+ processes in runnable state sounds like another thing entirely. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]