Monday, December 3, 2007

KDE and gamin

In the Ports builds of KDE 3.5.8, I enabled FAM (with gamin) support in kdelibs. Unfortunately, the tradeoff has been excessive CPU usage by gam_server, much more than is normal with GNOME. Some googling showed that this may not be unique to Cygwin, but can happen on Linux as well. While I'd be interested to hear if anyone has noticed any positive effects from the FAM support, at this point, I think I'm going to have to rebuild kdelibs without it.

1 comment:

Yaakov said...

Long-overdue update:

The problem was that KDE insists on monitoring several large directories, and with polling hardcoded to every second, that was taking a lot of CPU cycles.

Fortunately, Cygwin 1.7 adds /etc/mounts, allowing us to use the same code as Linux to configure this to a more normal interval:

$ cat ~/.gaminrc
fsset ntfs poll 10

With that, I have reenabled FAM support in both KDE 3.5 and 4.2.