[arch-general] famd problems

[Jan de Groot]

On Fri, 2007-12-28 at 00:45 +0100, _saiko wrote:
> Famd has always been more problematic then useful for me.
> On random occasions after i plugged a mp3 player or an external usb 
> drive it would just start using cpu @ 100% and there was no change at 
> all. I had to kill the process.
> 
> Just now i plugged my USB drive and wanted to copy something. CPU usage 
> was 100% and iostat reported <3MB/s rate non sequential!
> I checked the processes and as expected ntfs-3g driver was using most 
> but famd was there too!
> So i nicely killed famd once again... and transfer rate went @ ~22MB/s 
> as expected
> 
> Is there a way to live without famd since all it brings are problems for me?
> It's required by many things so i can't just remove it.
> 
> I'm doing a regular -Syu and this problem was present ... since like forever
> 
> Any explanation to this?
> Also i'm using xfce, 2GB ram, separate physical system drive
> 
> Many thanks

New applications can use inotify too and don't need fam at all for
filesystem monitoring. I do have fam installed as a dependency for
gnome-vfs on my system, but I don't have the daemon running. As long as
you don't run the daemon, there's nothing wrong with fam.
The only reason to use fam nowadays is when you have an NFS mounted
homedir that can't do inotify.