James Litchfield wrote: > B82 x86 > > Fired up prstat the other day and noticed something new: gam_server was > running around madly stating files. This seems to be > > http://www.gnome.org/~veillard/gamin/ > > The obvious question is why not use the Solaris file monitoring > capabilities instead of stating the world away.... > > The next question is "can I turn this thing off > and not have a negative impact?' > > > This message posted from opensolaris.org > _______________________________________________ > desktop-discuss mailing list > desktop-discuss at opensolaris.org > I'm going off on a limb by guessing, but it sounds like a cross-platform GNU alternative to the FSEvents API in Mac OS X Leopard specifically for Nautilus and other GNOME core components to access, reducing overhead by theory by caching metadata, file names, similar to Beagle I would suspect but with capability of providing a mechanism to offload unnecessary disk access through the same fashion. In this instance, something is obviously a miss, it doesn't prefetch. Don't quote me though, I really don't have a lot of experience writing GTK+ applications for GNOME, let alone hooking into relatively new API's and subsystems. A simple Google search reports "Gamin is a file and directory monitoring system defined to be a subset of the FAM (File alteration monitor)" By design, its purpose was to improve responsiveness, so turning it off could have consequences on systems where it is behaving correctly by making it necessary to make expensive file access calls directly.
James C.
