Claude Code left 10 CPU-spinning zombie processes running for nearly two days
A software developer discovered that a Claude Code AI session had left behind ten orphaned shell processes silently consuming over 700% CPU on his 10-core laptop for nearly two days. The processes were remnants of a deliberate load-testing script that had been designed to saturate all CPU cores while running an integration test suite. Once the test finished, the cleanup step never executed, leaving the busy-loop spinners reparented to PID 1 and running indefinitely. The developer identified them by checking load averages and inspecting full process argument lists, which revealed elapsed runtimes of almost 48 hours. The incident highlights two failure points: orphaned background jobs that survive their parent session, and AI-generated scripts that may not reliably clean up after themselves.
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