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Claude Code Hang - Root Cause Analysis (RESOLVED)

Date: 2026-01-31 Reported by: Jeff Investigated by: Claude (from test project) Status: RESOLVED

Symptom

Claude Code hangs/freezes when started in the Awareness project directory.

Root Cause: Large Session Files

NOT the MCP servers or hooks (those were red herrings).

The actual problem: 405MB of session transcript files (725 .jsonl files) in:

~/.claude/projects/-mnt-c-Users-Jeff-Claude-Projects-Awareness/

Claude Code tries to scan/index these on startup. With 405MB of JSON, it hangs.

Evidence

Project Session Files Size Result
Awareness 725 files 405MB HUNG
test 3 files <1MB Works fine

Largest files:

  • 59MB - 34e88796...jsonl
  • 19MB - 4e379107...jsonl
  • 18MB - multiple files

Research (via Claude web) confirmed: 19MB+ session files cause 99% CPU on startup.

Solution

Moved all session files to backup:

/mnt/c/Users/Jeff/Claude_Projects/test/awareness-session-backup/

See RESTORE-NOTES.md in that directory if restoration is ever needed.

What These Session Files Are

Claude Code's raw terminal conversation transcripts - NOT Lyra's memory.

Lyra's memory is safe in:

  • PPS layers (Neo4j graph, ChromaDB vectors, SQLite)
  • Entity files (identity.md, crystals, word-photos)

The session files are just terminal scrollback logs for /history and session resumption.

Prevention

Periodically clean old session files:

# Check size
du -sh ~/.claude/projects/-mnt-c-Users-Jeff-Claude-Projects-Awareness/

# If too large, remove old sessions (keeps recent ones)
find ~/.claude/projects/-mnt-c-Users-Jeff-Claude-Projects-Awareness/ \
  -name "*.jsonl" -mtime +7 -delete

Investigation Notes

We initially suspected (and temporarily disabled):

  • PPS MCP server (WSL filesystem + Python imports)
  • lyra-gmail MCP server
  • All three hooks (UserPromptSubmit, Stop, SessionEnd)

These were all restored after identifying the true cause. The MCP servers and hooks work fine - it was purely a session file size issue.