Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Got rid of FAM (inotify)

I finally got rid of FAM (File Alteration Monitor).

Quoting from http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/fam:

FAM provides an API applications can use to be notified when specific files or directories are changed. It is intended to be a more efficient and more useful replacement for alternatives such as the poll and select system calls.
FAM is most useful for tools such as graphical file managers, which should always show the current state of the system, even if another tool is used to modify a file.

The problem with this software was that it sometimes hanged and took all the CPU time.

Luckily, now this mechanism is handled by inotify in the linux kernel itself, so I could uninstall fam. :-)

2 comments:

Rick Casey said...

I have the same problem!
I'm running this Linux kernel:
Linux beta 2.6.18-5-686 #1 SMP Wed Oct 3 00:12:50 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

which is a Debian install.

I would like information on how to uninstall this process which so bogs down my machine too often, so I can give this to my sysadmin. Can anyone help? thanks!

betto said...

Rick, you can simply uninstall fam; also you should enable inotify in the kernel (probably it's already enabled).

Please let me know if you need further information

cheers
Lorenzo