Hello everyone!
Maybe somebody knows what this is about?
After returning from standby, my Macbook has become very unresponsive with heavy beachballing.
I had opened iTunes, Unity, Blender, Blender, TextEdit and Safari. Usually, this is no problem, so I decided to take a look into the Activity Monitor.
Turns out, there are two weird processes I didn’t know about:
“Electron Helper” (taking 34,04GB space*) and “Electron Helper (doesn’t react)” (taking 253,0MB space).
*Note that my RAM is only 8GB! This whatever-it-is has decreased my HDD free space by about 52GB compared to its usual size!!
This seems pretty troubling. Am I having a serious problem here?
I googled for this process but I haven’t found anything useful.
Just as a side note, ““Digital Images”-Expansion” (not sure if that’s the English name for it) takes up 253MB as well, which is quite a bit. Is this usual?
EDIT: Also, a few days ago I installed Visual Studio Code 0.9. Could this be related?
I tried to install custom themes with running “npm install -g yo” in the Terminal, which didn’t work, though.
Best wishes,
Shu
EDIT 2:
Oh cr#p. This actually grows. The Activity Monitor now says “50,62GB” for Electron Helper and it’s getting bigger.
kernel_task seems to get bigger as well. It’s at about 1GB now.
This is happening on Mac OS 10.10.2.
EDIT 3:
“The Electron framework lets you write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It is based on Node.js and Chromium and is used in the Atom editor.” ( from here: GitHub - electron/electron: :electron: Build cross-platform desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS )
Node.js was mentioned in the instructions for custom themes in VSC ( here: Visual Studio Code June 2024 )
Soooo, did I install something bad?
EDIT 4:
I just scanned my computer using GrandPerspective and it turns out the data is stored at “private/var/vm/swapfilexx”, where xx is a number different on each file.
It’s almost at 60GB now and the Macbook gets even more slower now.
EDIT 5:
Oh and just in case: I updated Unity (to 5.2.2) and Blender (to 2.76) as well.
EDIT 6:
For whatever reason, the “Electron Helper” process is at 74,1MB now and most of the swap files have vanished. Only two of them are left (about 2GB in total).
The problem seems to be gone for now. But I’d really like to know what this is or was about, because it may happen again.
EDIT 7:
I just quit Visual Studio Code, which made both “Electron Helper” and “Electron Helper (doesn’t react)” disappear. So I guess this is a problem related to VSC.
TL;DR:
Apparently, Visual Studio Code 0.9 just ate about 60GB of my HDD space using swap files. At some point, most of them disappeared for whatever reason. “Electron Helper”, the once 60GB (at that point about 74MB) process, disappeared completely after closing VSC.
