Arch Linux

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Runaway FAM daemon

Has anyone noticed FAM becoming a runaway process?

I first started having problems using Squeeze with Thunar. Sometimes it would stop launching, then Thunar would stop functioning. If I did 'killall squeeze' from the command line, I could get Thunar back. Actually, I could hit 'killall squeeze' as many times as I wanted to without getting complaints! I removed Squeeze in favor of Xarchiver, and everything seemed fine.

Later, I went to go launch an image from Thunar into GQview, and GQview wouldn't launch. I tried killall and there was a complaint about no running process. Then I killed Thunar and couldn't get it back. I decided to fire up 'top' to see what was happening and sure enough FAM had swallowed up all of one of the cores of my processor.

I checked Flyspray for bugs and didn't see any. I wanted to check here to see if anyone else is having this problem.

64 bit
E17 (happened in XFCE also)
Thunar and it's supporting cast including volman (both the non-svn and svn versions)

peart

Member

From: Kanuckistan

Registered: 2003-07-28

Posts: 510

Re: Runaway FAM daemon

skottish,

fam has gone nutso on me on a few occasions.  The thing is, I don't even notice it when it happens, so I can't say what's causing it.  All I can say is that I check my logs every once in a while, and several of the files are humongous (several hundred megs).  They contain thousands of lines that say something like "fam: message was too long".  There are hundreds of these lines per second.

I also use Thunar and GQview, but not squeeze.  Xfce4, i686.  The next time it happens, hopefully I'll notice and will be able to gather some info.
Ciao

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: Runaway FAM daemon

Thanks. This is helpful. I just installed gamin as a replacement. Hopefully it's sane.

Edit:

Yup, there are a crap load of:

Dec 22 21:55:58 localhost famd[7003]: failed to accept new client: Too many open files

errors. It was spitting out hundreds per second.

Last edited by skottish (2007-12-24 05:43:42)

peart

Member

From: Kanuckistan

Registered: 2003-07-28

Posts: 510

Re: Runaway FAM daemon

Hmmm we have separate problems.  My log message was "message length X bytes exceeds max..."  I went looking around, and found this, that may interest you (well maybe not, since you've switched to gamin):

Simultaneous requests: Each client process can have up to 1024 active requests. This is a limitation of the select() system call.

Does FAM have any bugs?

Rapid requests: If a client monitors a directory containing several thousand files or several hundred directories and fam is built with the DNotify patch, fam will start to use lots of CPU time and stop reporting changes. This issue has been resolved in a recent GNU C library release.

Taken from http://oss.sgi.com/projects/fam/faq.html#limitations

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: Runaway FAM daemon

I'll bet that error handling is broken in FAM. In my case, spawning thousands of error messages for opening one file? The same file I could open again without issue after reboot? This is clearly a bug and I'll bet it's the same problem that you've seen. I'll test out gamin for a few days and see if it helps.

Last edited by skottish (2007-12-24 07:35:33)

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: Runaway FAM daemon

I have errors with gamin too. This one again spawned thousands of times. I guess it's time to file a bug report.

Last edited by skottish (2007-12-24 20:22:50)