Infinite loop when running npm i

[dustinsoftware]

After installing v0.7.0-beta3, I've now observed a few cases where running npm i causes thousands of processes to spawn. It's hard to tell if this is new behavior; I will attempt a downgrade if I can find a repro. Whenever this happens I have to log out of my workstation to get all the processes to close.

(unreliable) Steps to repro:

• Open a new instance of Powershell
• Run npm i, observe it works
• Run npm i again, observe it hangs and thousands of processes spawn

[chriskrycho]

Yikes! 😱 Thank you for reporting this (and for testing the beta for us)! A couple follow-up questions—

• does this ever show up with yarn or only with npm?
• does it show up more in specific repos?
• does it happen in non-Powershell environments on Windows, e.g. in CMD?

[charlespierce]

@dustinsoftware That's not good behavior 😦 I know I ran into issues with this in the past, and I documented some of what I found in this issue: #577 However, since we're using the cmd.exe /C "workaround", it's a bit surprising to see it crop up again!

Out of curiosity, is this in a project that has node pinned, or is it using the default Node / npm version (e.g. outside of a project or in a non-pinned project)? If it's outside of a pinned project, do you have npm available from a separate installation, or is Volta the only Node / npm installation you have?

Thanks for reporting and helping us test!