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Bug 313606 - gam_server eats my CPU
gam_server eats my CPU
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Product: gamin
Classification: Other
Component: general
unspecified
Other Linux
: Normal normal
: ---
Assigned To: Gamin Maintainer(s)
Gamin Maintainer(s)
gnome[unmaintained]
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2005-08-16 09:11 UTC by David Saxton
Modified: 2018-07-01 08:47 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---



Description David Saxton 2005-08-16 09:11:34 UTC
Distribution/Version: ubuntu

Firstly: I am aware of the numerous bug reports filed against gamin for 
excessive CPU usage. However, these bug reports all claim to have been fixed 
prior to the version I am using (0.1.5 from an ubuntu package). Therefore, I do 
not believe this is the same bug, and as such, am filing it as a new bug. 
 
This bug also occurred using 0.1.3 gamin from an ubuntu package. 
 
I am reposting this from http://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=6500 as I 
have received no response from ubuntu developers, and believe this to be a 
gamin bug rather than a packaging bug anyway: 
 
 
I've been keeping a record over the past week of what strace'ing gam_server 
does, and it's the same pattern everytime - a small set of files   
are getting repeatedly queried (or something...), thousands of times a second. 
Here are a few examples:   
   
....   
stat("/home/david/.kde/share/config/ksslpolicies6Tr6mb.new", 0x7fffffc3fb20) = 
-1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)   
stat("/home/david/.kde/share/config/knotesrcrq8aSb.new", 0x7fffffc3fb20) = -1 
ENOENT (No such file or directory)   
stat("/home/david/.kde/share/config/ksslpolicies6Tr6mb.new", 0x7fffffc3fb20) = 
-1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)   
stat("/home/david/.kde/share/config/knotesrcrq8aSb.new", 0x7fffffc3fb20) = -1 
ENOENT (No such file or directory)   
.... (repeated for those above two files thousands of times)   
   
   
...   
stat("/home/david/.inkscape", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0750, st_size=80, ...}) = 0   
stat("/home/david/.gstreamer-0.8", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=80, ...}) = 0   
stat("/home/david/.inkscape", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0750, st_size=80, ...}) = 0   
stat("/home/david/.gstreamer-0.8", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=80, ...}) = 0   
...   
   
etc.   
 
gam_server will continue to suck up as much CPU as possible, slowing my 
computer down until I manually kill gam_server. Then I'm ok for a little while, 
until gam_server decides to start eating my CPU again. Very annoying, made more 
so by the fact that I would have removed gam_server long ago, were it not for 
all the software that relies on it in ubuntu.
Comment 1 John McCutchan 2005-08-16 17:31:29 UTC
One way to avoid this problem is to use inotify. Gamin 0.1.5 has a great inotify
backend that doesn't touch poll the filesystem except for missing resources.
Comment 2 David Saxton 2005-08-16 22:37:22 UTC
I've patched and recompiled my kernel, and so far, gam_server seems ok. 
Hopefully it'll stay that way :) 
 
Comment 3 Jonathan Brooks 2005-10-20 13:24:09 UTC
Hi,

I'm coming across worryingly similar problems with Gnome 2.12 under SuSE10
x86_64. If I look in the logs I find things like:

Oct 17 10:59:31 anat0098 gam_server: *** glibc detected *** double free or
corruption (out): 0x000000000051e9d0 ***
Oct 17 10:59:35 anat0098 kernel: gam_server[2185]: segfault at 0000000000500000
rip 00002aaaaadbfec7 rsp 00007fffffca4e20 error 4

And when using the machine, at completely unpredictable intervals the CPU will
suddenly go 100%. Using top, I will always find one of either gnome-settings,
gnome-panel, gnome-vfs-daemon or nautilis as the offending program. If I kill
the process the system recovers and will carry on until the next slow-down.

This is a pretty disasterous bug for me, and the SuSE mailing list have been no
help at all in fixing it. Not surprising given the KDE-centric world SuSE live in.

How do you patch gamin to use inotify?

Cheers, Jon.
Comment 4 Ed Catmur 2005-10-25 21:19:10 UTC
re comment 3: perhaps bug 319697 - if you have home NFS mounted?
Comment 5 André Klapper 2018-07-01 08:47:17 UTC
gamin is not under active development anymore and has not seen code changes for many years.
Its codebase has been archived: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Archive/gamin/commits/master

Closing this report as WONTFIX as part of Bugzilla Housekeeping to reflect reality. Please feel free to reopen this ticket (or rather transfer the project to GNOME Gitlab, as GNOME Bugzilla is deprecated) if anyone takes the responsibility for active development again.