When browsing an NTFS-3G mounted share with thunar-0.9.3 and then go deep into a folder with lots of .mp3-files, the CPU load at ntfs-3g almost never goes under 60% on a Dell m1330 with Core2 Duo T7500. After a lot of trial and error, this seemed to get caused by thunar depending on gam_server, because the ntfs-3g load went down to a negligible load when I took a killall gam_server. I solved this by fixing a depency in thunar-0.9.3.ebuild. In the original ebuild thunar depends on "virtual/fam". This pulls both app-admin/gam-server and app-admin/gamin. If "virtual/fam" gets changed to "dev-libs/libgamin", all thunar dependencies are solved, but you don't get the gam_server package installed. And this leads to no gam_server binary running when starting thunar, and thereby no massive amount of load during directory walking. Suggestion: thunar should have a fam useflag that disables fam support altogether. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Have a mounted ntfs-3g file system with a directory with lots of mp3s in. 2. Browse this folder with thunar 3. Experience massive amount of CPU load with ntfs-3g 4. Get rid of this load by "killall gam_server"
Created attachment 179119 [details] ebuild for thunar with libgamin dependency instead of virtual/fam
It should be mentioned that removing gamin from the machine involves having to press F5 to see newly added icons to the desktop, for instance. (HAL auto adding of devices to desktop works though.)
We aren't going to be able to remove the gam_server dep from this package. If we blocked it, then a whole bunch of people would get upset because it would conflict with alot of packages. If we change the dep then it would (probably) still get used if it was on the system and wouldn't help anyway. Have you filed a bug upstream at bugs.xfce.org yet?
also, have you checked this with other apps/file managers? this doesn't sound like a Thunar issue.
No, I have not filed any bugs upstream yet... You sure the gamin-dependency isn't Gentoo-specific? Thunar is the only application on my system which requires anything related to fam, and since Thunar works very well when gamin/gamserver is uninstalled, I haven't got any reason to install other file managers.
The point of filing this bug under thunar is that there should be added an option to disable fam within thunar. My understanding is that fam is deprecated, and should be replaced with things like Inotify or other kernel-provided solutions.
glib with USE=fam (which is enabled by default on desktop profiles) requires virtual/fam which is satisfied by app-admin/fam and app-admin/gamin, so basically every gtk+ app and more should indirectly depend on it. And like darkside already said, File Alteration Monitors are used to monitor... file alterations. I also didn't ask you to use a different file manager, I asked you if this is reproducable with other file managers on your machine, so we can say if it's a Thunar issue or if it's really a gamin or even ntfs-3g issue. Adding a libgamin to satisy the virtual/fam dependency is an ugly hack and we won't add it, if you want inotify support, then that's a feature request and you should take it upstream.
As far as I know, fam isn't enabled by default in default-linux 2008.0-profile... I haven't got any -fam in my make.conf, and glib compiles with USE="-fam" Will take this issue upstream later on.
like I said, it is enabled on desktop profiles: angelos@odin profiles % grep fam targets/desktop/make.defaults 5:USE="acpi alsa branding cairo cdr dbus dvd dvdr dvdread eds emboss encode esd evo fam firefox gif gnome gpm gstreamer gtk hal jpeg kde ldap libnotify mad mikmod mp3 mpeg ogg opengl pdf png ppds qt3 qt3support qt4 quicktime sdl spell svg tiff truetype vorbis win32codecs unicode usb X xml xulrunner xv" also, regarding your inotify request, I'm pretty sure upstream will reject it because gamin already uses inotify on Linux, implementing it directly in Thunar will just produce more overhead to maintain and won't be usable anywhere else (BSD for example is also supported by Thunar and they don't have inotify). I'll close this as RESO UPSTREAM wrt last comment.
