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.
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.
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.
I had a quick look at preventing excessive looping. Its not trivial, the restarting happens an multiple levels.
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.
Noting that the original report is almost a year old, has anybody seen this problem in recent times ?
I've not seen that problem, just gam using up ridiculous amounts of memory.
Ok, lets move this of the blocker list then
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.