Memory leak - npm subprocesses

[stacy-rendall]

Does this issue occur when all extensions are disabled?: TBC

• VS Code Version: 1.89.1 and 1.89.0
• OS Version: Windows 10, Windows 11

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Open an Node.js project in VS Code/VS Codium
2. ...can't tell what initiates it, sometimes happens after a few minutes, sometimes never happens...
3. VS Code starts spawning thousands of subprocesses until the computer runs out of memory
4. the subprocesses that continually appear under VS Code in Task Manager are npm view --json -- <something> dist-tags.latest homepage version time, until Task Manager becomes unresponsive
5. rolling back to 1.88.x seems to fix the issue

Currently testing with extensions disabled, will update here if it happens again with extensions disabled.

[vscodenpa]

Thanks for creating this issue! It looks like you may be using an old version of VS Code, the latest stable release is 1.89.1. Please try upgrading to the latest version and checking whether this issue remains.

Happy Coding!

[meganrogge]

pls let us know what happened with extensions disabled

[stacy-rendall]

Still haven't been able to reliably reproduce the error - it did happen once while I had only ESLint extension enabled, and I ran npm i or npm update in the folder, but I haven't been able to force it to happen again - typically I am working across multiple VS Code windows in different repositories, so it may be a multiple step repro

[deepak1556]

The command in question comes from the builtin npm extension

vscode/extensions/npm/src/features/packageJSONContribution.ts

Line 288 in 5250661

const args = ['view', '--json', '--', pack, 'description', 'dist-tags.latest', 'homepage', 'version', 'time'];

It would be good to have a reliable repro to help us debug this issue further. Thanks!

[chrmarti]

@meganrogge #210601 was added between the two versions.

[stacy-rendall]

Thanks @chrmarti - that's the missing link, I can reliably reproduce the issue now, simply by hovering over a package version in package.json (all extensions disabled)

Node version 20.13.1
NPM 10.8.0

On one of my PCs exhibiting the issue Node was installed via Volta 1.1.1 (so not corepack enabled), can't check the other install right now but I think it was installed via NVS or similar...

[frankli0324]

@stacy-rendall I think the command is missing some of the environment variables I forgot to inherit from the main process and should be fixed by #212856

[frankli0324]

should be already fixed by #213306

[stacy-rendall]

I can confirm that the issue is no longer occurring in Version: 1.90.0-insider

[meganrogge]

closing given it doesn't reproduce in insider's