Bug 171166

Summary:	gam_server restarting many times a second
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Dave Malcolm <dmalcolm>
Component:	gamin	Assignee:	Alexander Larsson <alexl>
Status:	CLOSED RAWHIDE	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	rawhide	CC:	eric-bugs
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2006-09-06 09:44:35 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:
Bug Depends On:
Bug Blocks:	150223

Description Dave Malcolm 2005-10-18 23:25:40 UTC

Description of problem:
Running rawhide(ish), seeing a problem where CPU usage becomes 70-80%, but
looking in top shows no obvious culprit.

On investigation it turns out that gam_server is restarting repeatedly,
occasionally visible for a fraction of a second in top or in gnome-system-monitor

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
gamin-0.1.6-3
kernel-2.6.13-1.1601_FC5

How reproducible:
Don't know.  Seems to happen perhaps every few hours on my workstation; killing
off gnome-settings-daemon seems to help.

Here's a link for my own reference to the debug notes on gamin:
http://www.gnome.org/~veillard/gamin/debug.html

What process is responsible for restarting gam_server?  I'm happy to try to
track this down myself, but it's so transient that it's difficult to debug.  Thanks.

Comment 1 Alexander Larsson 2006-08-14 12:24:42 UTC

Any app that uses gamin will cause it to restart when its needed. However, it
shouldn't restart, because it shouldn't exit in the first place. Need to figure
out why its exiting.

Comment 2 Eric Hopper 2006-08-14 17:22:22 UTC

Of course, the process that continually restarts gam_server needs to throttle
itself a bit as well.  If the first few restarts fail, put in a greater interval
before it'll try again until its down to re-trying only once every 5-10 seconds
or so.

Defense in depth.  A bug that causes gam_server to crash all the time should be,
as much as possible, prevented from having a seriously negative effect on the
system as a whole.

Comment 3 Alexander Larsson 2006-08-16 06:48:05 UTC

I had a quick look at preventing excessive looping. Its not trivial, the
restarting happens an multiple levels.

Comment 4 Eric Hopper 2006-08-16 16:54:27 UTC

This is a big change, but perhaps gam_server could be configured to be on DBus
instead.  Then you can have a watchdog daemon that makes sure it stays healthy,
and apps can communicate with it via DBus.

Comment 5 Matthias Clasen 2006-08-19 02:10:20 UTC

Noting that the original report is almost a year old, has anybody
seen this problem in recent times ?

Comment 6 Eric Hopper 2006-08-19 07:39:11 UTC

I've not seen that problem, just gam using up ridiculous amounts of memory.

Comment 7 Matthias Clasen 2006-08-19 14:29:08 UTC

Ok, lets move this of the blocker list then

Comment 8 Alexander Larsson 2006-09-06 09:44:35 UTC

Lots of gamin fixing in rawhide lately. Please open new bugs with details if you
get anything like this with gamin 0.1.7-6 or later.