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Since the upgrade to High Sierra my MacBook is crashing regularly in a catastrophic way that forces me to trigger a hard reset every time.

I suspect htop being the culprit, but I can't tell for sure.

This is what happened about half a dozen times now:

I'm working in either iTerm2 or the Terminal app. Suddenly and seemingly at random iTerm2/Terminal crashes. I'm still able to Force Quit it then.

But then the whole system is left in a really messed up state where I can't start any Apps anymore. Even worse, triggering a restart won't succeed in shutting down the system. My only option left then is to hard-reset the MacBook.

First I suspected iTerm2 and used the Terminal app instead. But exactly the same thing then also happened using the latter. It does not seem to be connected to anything particular I'm doing in the Terminal.

I do have the habit though to always have an instance of htop (version 2.0.2, installed via brew install htop) running in some terminal pane to be able to conveniently monitor processes and CPU/Memory usage while I'm working.

So a running htop instance is the only common precondition for the crashes I can identify.

Because I don't know how to further encircle this problem, I resort to asking here:

Is anyone else experiencing (similar) problems with running htop on High Sierra? And does anyone maybe even have a solution for this?

Suggestions about what I could do to get to the bottom of this would also be very welcome.

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    I'm having the same problem, both on a hackintosh and a real macbook pro.
    – user257503
    Sep 28, 2017 at 10:55
  • Thanks for replying, good to know I'm not the only one! Are you sure that htop is the root cause for the problem? Did it ever happen to you when not running htop? Do you know of any way to positively confirm the assumption that htop is to be blamed?
    – anothernode
    Sep 28, 2017 at 10:57
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    I am not sure htop is the root cause, however this issue only ever happened when I was running htop or immediately after closing it. The fact that the system remains unstable even after force quitting iTerm/Terminal.app hints at some resource starvation. I suspect some change in High Sierra is making htop leak mach ports.
    – user257503
    Sep 28, 2017 at 11:02
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    All right, someone filed a bug on GitHub for this already two days ago...
    – anothernode
    Sep 28, 2017 at 12:02
  • same problem here
    – David 天宇 Wong
    Dec 8, 2017 at 1:43

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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I the meantime lots of people have reported the same behavior on GitHub.

Also, I'm 96.73% sure that htop does not crash when started with sudo. I guess that's the best workaround until someone gets around to fix the root cause.

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I found another (safer than sudo) workaround: launching it with valgrind does the trick for me:

valgrind htop

you can install using Homebrew by running:

brew install valgrind

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