Arch Linux

Kyle Carter

Member

Registered: 2008-02-14

Posts: 91

Gamin/gam_server eating 70%+ of my CPU

Searched for this, no solutions on the forum that I could find. Noticed gam_server starts to eat up most of my CPU when I've had the PC on for a while. Not entirely sure what it does, if I can uninstall/disable it, but it's a pain in the ass when simple web browsing gets dragged to a near halt twice a day or so.

Any advice?

InfernalH

Member

From: Lithuania/Klaipeda-Vilnius

Registered: 2005-02-08

Posts: 101

Website

Re: Gamin/gam_server eating 70%+ of my CPU

community/gamin 0.1.10-1
    Gamin is a file and directory monitoring system defined to be a subset of
    the FAM (File Alteration Monitor) system.

I actually don't have installed this and everything works smoothly. Try to disable it

Heller_Barde

Member

Registered: 2008-04-01

Posts: 245

Re: Gamin/gam_server eating 70%+ of my CPU

before there was inotify in the kernel there was dnotify which afaik was a royal pain to work with. so they made a daemon named fam (file alteration monitor) so programs like e.g. filemanagers could display changes to the current folder without you pressing f5 and without a useless event loop to reload all seconds or so. and gamin provides a subset of fam's features but is also a lot lighter on ressources (usually  ) and dependencies.
now with inotify afaik it's better to directly use the in-kernel inotify instead of fam/gamin. but some programs e.g. thunar still have the fam/gamin bindings to provide "real-time" file alteration information.

if i forgot something, correct me but i think that's about how it is

cheers Barde

jacko

Member

Registered: 2007-11-23

Posts: 840

Re: Gamin/gam_server eating 70%+ of my CPU

before there was inotify in the kernel there was dnotify which afaik was a royal pain to work with. so they made a daemon named fam (file alteration monitor) so programs like e.g. filemanagers could display changes to the current folder without you pressing f5 and without a useless event loop to reload all seconds or so. and gamin provides a subset of fam's features but is also a lot lighter on ressources (usually  ) and dependencies.
now with inotify afaik it's better to directly use the in-kernel inotify instead of fam/gamin. but some programs e.g. thunar still have the fam/gamin bindings to provide "real-time" file alteration information.

if i forgot something, correct me but i think that's about how it is

cheers Barde

So you don't really need either of these then?

I use pcmanfm atm

Nezmer

Member

Registered: 2008-10-24

Posts: 559

Website

Re: Gamin/gam_server eating 70%+ of my CPU

If gamin is a dependency of a package you use , You can replace It with fam (fam provides gamin & vice versa) .

Gamin is supposed to be lighter but I had the same issue(bug) you're having so I replaced it with fam .

--EDIT--
@jacko
You need either gamin or fam . gamin is recommended If you don't have any issues running it .

Last edited by Nezmer (2009-01-24 14:31:48)

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English is not my native language .

R00KIE

Forum Fellow

From: Between a computer and a chair

Registered: 2008-09-14

Posts: 4,734

Re: Gamin/gam_server eating 70%+ of my CPU

In my experience gamin works a lot better (with thunar) than fam does. For me both in ubuntu (which I used before moving to Arch) and in Arch sometimes fam starts to use close to 100% of one of the CPUs for no special reason. fam does provide more functionality than gamin does though, I was told that fam is a lot more efficient if you use nfs and want to keep the file list updated, but as I don't use nfs gamin works much better for me.
File alteration monitoring (with thunar) seem to be a little broken with fam if you login graphically with two (or more) separate users, only the last user to login will get file changes notifications, while with gamin it will work ok for everyone. Also when thunar hangs and you kill it (usually I use "killall Thunar") if you are using fam you need to restart the daemon, with gamin you just need to open thunar again.
Keep in mind that some programs may behave a little awkwardly, one example is medit, latest packages it will not monitor file changes properly if you use gamin, you will need to recompile it from abs changing the PKGBUILD (remove the build option --with-fam, will file a bug or something later when I ask around the best way to suggest that change).

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R00KIE
Tm90aGluZyB0byBzZWUgaGVyZSwgbW92ZSBhbG9uZy4K

Heller_Barde

Member

Registered: 2008-04-01

Posts: 245

Re: Gamin/gam_server eating 70%+ of my CPU

well, to summarize all that:

you don't NEED to turn on either of these.
for dependency reasons you have one of them on your system.

thunar (or pcmanfm probably) just won't update your current folder automatically (which is not too bad, just hit F5 when you want it to update folder contents)

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: Gamin/gam_server eating 70%+ of my CPU

As I just posted elsewhere, there seems to be problems with pcmanfm updating sometimes, and I believe that it's because of the new gamin. This is true for me with pcmanfm and pcmanfm-svn.