Zombie VS Code Processes From a Hung Claude Session Caused a Linux Load Spike
A developer's four-core Linux machine recorded a load average of 38.7 on the morning of August 15th, traced back to a Claude Code session that had stalled inside VS Code the previous night. The root cause was 59 orphaned vscode-server processes consuming 7.3 GB of RAM, spawned by failed retries of the hung session between 2:04 and 2:11 a.m. that never properly exited. Because VS Code's Remote-SSH server runs detached from any SSH session, these processes were immune to normal session cleanup and accumulated unnoticed over roughly 20 hours. Memory pressure from the bloated processes triggered an IO storm, pushing dozens of tasks into uninterruptible wait states that inflated the load average without representing real CPU work. The fix required surgically killing only the orphaned extension-host trees, avoiding the live server process that was still hosting the developer's active window.
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