Is anyone else having problems with using htop on High Sierra

high sierraitermterminal

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.

Best Answer

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.

Related Question