SuSE 9.3 'fam' causes slowdown & lockups
 

Hi Folks...

I'm having a hell of a time with 'fam' running on SuSE 9.3.

I have SuSE 9.3 installed on both my tower/server & my laptop, the tower is on 24/7 and is used as a file/media server & runs aMule & Azureus constantly. After a while (usually about 10hrs of uptime), the 'fam' process is taking over the system, causing applications (usually Konqueror, K3b, Kaffeine) to take upto 5-10 mins to start (if at all) and Firefox just starts to lock up and can't download a file from link (locks up), if left for 20+ hours fam will either get worse and cause KDE to lockup (unable to restart X although I can switch to a console session and manually reboot) or settle down to cause the system to remain up but slow and unstable.

Killing the process instantly releives the problems and SuSE becomes light & snappy again. Both have ReiserFS filesystems.

Any advice on what to do with this?...
Just keep killing the process on bootup?
Disable fam on bootup?... How?
Change distros? (although I really like SuSE 9.3)

The same also happens on my laptop which is a better CPU/RAM spec than the tower and it's never subjected to as much load.


Any advice appreciated.

Vin

You can use a tool called chkconfig to turn off fam at boot time. Debian based distro's are awesome because of a packet manager. I tried suse for about a year and was not very impressed, it is slower even on a computer with 512MB memory.

Great..

A quick 'chkconfig -s fam off' on both PC's did the trick nicely... cheers.


I did try SuSE 9.1 a while back and wasn't too impressed either... 9.3 has so far been a great all round OS apart from some of what I would consider major usability issues to start with, such as deliberatley modified/crippled multimedia apps and now this problem with this file access monitor daemon. It is quicker than previous versions and other distros I've tried, especially Xandros... now that's slow.
I assume there may be some updates around the corner to iron things out.

I mainly stuck with 9.3 though because it's the first distro to bundle Xen and it's pretty noob freindly, Xen's installation process looked daunting but I wanted to dabble in multiple distros without having to pay for the likes of VMware or waste disk space with multiple partitions... now I run Red Hat9, Debian Woody, FC3 & Mandrake 10.1 in windows on top of my SuSE desktop which is ideal for learning.


Thanks for the help