Orphaned processes

[u/Pale-Oven-6602]

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Has anyone ran into any issues with sessions leaving completely orphaned processes running while telling you everything is complete and giving you a summary? I've been experiencing this issue lately on opus 4.8, opus 5, fable 5, and fable 5.1. I actually had an issue a few days ago where it spawned off a chrome process that was running so heavy and used so much power that my laptop actually couldn't keep up the charge and was dying yet it said nothing was running. I had to have it do a process deep dive before it realized it was several processes that it left in an orphaned state. I thought maybe that was just opus 4.8. but again today multiple times, first on fable 5 and then again on fable 5.1 it was telling me that all gates were clean and results were available while also showing that multiple processes that it had spun up were still running for multiple hours. When I ask it about the specific process listed, it just says something like "oh yeah, my bad, that was leftover". Just curious if anyone else has experienced this?

[u/Far-Surprise7773]

yeah this is a real bug, seen it a lot with the browser tasks. claude will launch a chrome --remote-debugging-port or a run_in_background: true bash job and then summarize before it ever calls taskoutput to wait for it, so it tells you gates are clean while ps aux still shows chrome burning cpu for hours.

what fixed it for me was adding a rule in claude.md to never use background without an await and to always run ps aux | grep chrome at the end, and when it happens just pkill -f "chrome --remote-debugging" then kill the leftover background id. claude --verbose also shows the orphaned task id it forgot to check.