Starting Volt makes macOS unusable (due to VPN?)

[brandondrew]

I was super excited to discover Volt (and even more so V), but I immediately ran into a show-stopper: upon first opening Volt it created an infinite loop of crashing and respawning itself, the net effect being much like a denial of service attack. I couldn't delete Volt from my /Applications directory because—besides taking several minutes to try this—the Finder complained that Volt was in use and couldn't be deleted. I spent several minutes trying to type killall Volt in iTerm, but this proved to be virtually impossible because Volt would respawn before I could bring iTerm to the front and type a character. The same was true with using Activity Monitor to kill it—it was just excruciating to try, and I eventually gave up.

I began trying to kill everything I could to reserve resources while I tried to think of a solution. Anything running in the menubar could potentially be killed with 2 clicks, and voila! Killing my VPN client suprisingly stopped Volt from the cycle of death and reincarnation. So it seems that the crash was somehow related to a network call failing because of the VPN. (Although it was set to use a split tunnel, so as far as I understand such things that shouldn't have blocked anything.)

Whatever was causing the crashing, it seems that the infinite respawning strategy (through launchd?) is unsafe for any app with a UI because exactly this situation can occur. Perhaps there can be a limit of 5 respawns?

I can only speculate what was happening, but I hope that I've given enough info for it to be obvious (or at least clearer) to you. I managed to get a screencast of it, in case that clarifies anything. And if I can provide any other info that might help, please let me know.

I look forward to using Volt (and learning V!).

volt-reincarnation-cycle.zip

[ivangreene]

Had the same experience. Was able to halt it by putting my computer to sleep which caused it to stop cycling, and then kill -9 when I opened it again. I was not running through a VPN at the time so unsure if it is necessarily connected to that

[pilhuhn]

Same here - had to reboot to stop this

[cbertelli]

Are you sure that you did not download the M1 version?

[pilhuhn]

@cbertelli I think 2y ago people did not yet know about the M1 or the like :) Also I'd expect that a M1 binary would not even start on ix86 so the issue of the respawn could not even happen.