Greetings:

I have been having an issue with gam_server taking up 100% of one of my CPU cores. I have searched around and have not come up with any definitive answers.

Some say it's NFS...............I don't run NFS.

Some say it's Firefox, if that's the case, time's that gam_server takes off, Firefox is not running.

Some say it is a Gnome issue...............I don't run Gnome.

Some say it is Xfce...............but it happens when I am not running Xfce. I'm running Fluxbox on 12.2

I cannot kill the process at all, not even as root, the only way to cure it is to reboot the box and that is not acceptable.

I have read the following, http://www.gnome.org/~veillard/gamin/config.html , and this provided no solution.

I understand that it is part of inotify......the only thing that I can think of is that I recently installed from SlackBuilds.org. libnotify, exo-notify and notification-daemon-xfce. I have a sneaky suspicion it is one of these????

Does anyone have a clue as to what it can be?? I'm stumped..........

I am not familiar with it but since it is a file alteration monitor system it must have to build it's baseline database. If this is a new behaviour then maybe it is still working it's way through your drive(s) to build that database???

If you do not use it, why is it running at all? Is it maybe part of an incomplete package?

What are you looking to do - can't you use inotify directly; say via inotify-tools

I'm not trying to do anything, it just randomly kicks in from what I can tell and hogs the CPU. In fact, I was just using mousepad a few moments ago to edit my fluxbox menu when I heard the CPU kick into overdrive. I ran top and 'lo and behold, 100% CPU usage from gam_server. I can't kill it at, either as user or root. All I can do is a reboot to kill the damn process.

Frustrating..........

EDIT:

Google "gam_server" and there is a ton of hits at what a problem this has been going back as far as 2004. Why am I seeing this issue now?

Perplexed..........

Ah sorry - I though you had installed it for a reason. I didn't realize Pat had built it in (no Slack here to check).

I may have found the solution:

After doing some more digging around & experimenting, I have not had any issue with gam_server going off the charts.

At first I created a .gaminrc file in my ~ that contained the following:

This did not appear to work so I then created a similar file in my /etc, although most of the recommendations were to put it in /etc/gamin but that does not exist in Slackware.

With the above, this tells gam_server to poll my filesystem every 10 seconds rather than what it was originally polling at.

It's been a few hours now and looking good.

Shouldn't need to poll at all - what does the (kernel) config have for inotify ???

Gamin website has a section which explains how to turn on the debug feature. Maybe you can try that and see what's causing the problem. There must be some application triggering this.

Regarding inotify, is it relevant in this setting? AFAIK it's the new notification system of the kernel that replaced dnotify and gamin is not part of it (nor the other way around).

inotify should (effectively ?) deprecate both fam and gamin.
The only thing I can think of that would need gamin these days on Linux is Thunar.

Yeah some file managers use it, like emelfm2 (actually it can be configured to use d/inotify as well, but the script on slackbuils.org uses gamin I think).

gam_server always runs when amarok is started, I imagine it's to poll the music collection directories.

Well, here it is 2019 and I'm having trouble with gam_server hogging CPU on my workstation at work! Putting .gaminrc file in ~ didn't help, and I don't have permission to edit /etc.

The workstation runs RHEL 7.4 (Linux 3.10.0) and KDE 4.14.8.

1 members found this post helpful.

Slackware relevance? ZERO.

Ok, sorry, I found this thread when I googled gam_server, and I didn't even realize it's a Slackware thread. It does contain more and better information about gam_server than any other thread I found. So, if I'm having trouble with gam_server on RHEL, should I really go elsewhere and create a new thread that doesn't contain the useful background information that this thread has?

Dude, yes. We don't care about your RHEL issues, it only pollutes the discussions in this Slackware forum.
This thread is also 11 years old, what you did is called "necro-posting" (look it up) and frowned upon.

You also did not add anything of value. The "and I don't have permission to edit /etc" makes me think you are working on a corporate desktop, so go find your IT support desk.