Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2009 14:45:29 GMT From: Graham Todd <gtodd@bellanet.org> To: freebsd-gnats-submit@FreeBSD.org Subject: ports/131121: devel/gamin - default polling frequency increases CPU load w/ large kern.maxfiles Message-ID: <200901291445.n0TEjTUa073709@www.freebsd.org> Resent-Message-ID: <200901291450.n0TEo1JX063745@freefall.freebsd.org>
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>Number: 131121 >Category: ports >Synopsis: devel/gamin - default polling frequency increases CPU load w/ large kern.maxfiles >Confidential: no >Severity: non-critical >Priority: low >Responsible: freebsd-ports-bugs >State: open >Quarter: >Keywords: >Date-Required: >Class: sw-bug >Submitter-Id: current-users >Arrival-Date: Thu Jan 29 14:50:01 UTC 2009 >Closed-Date: >Last-Modified: >Originator: Graham Todd >Release: FreeBSD 7.1-PRERELEASE-p1 i386 >Organization: >Environment: FreeBSD 7.1-PRERELEASE-p1 #0: Mon Nov 24 11:49:24 UTC 2008 root@i386-builder.daemonology.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC i386 >Description: gam_server consumes a high level of CPU (10%) which pushes overall load quite high for a desktop system. Even with a busy files system and many open files CPU and memory hogging should be the exclusive domain of firefox-bin ;-) ... This appeared on systems with gamin-0.1.10 and recent gnome upgrade. On a multi-user desktop with number testing jails a higher kern.maxfiles setting is needed. Perhaps gam_server now uses a more frequent default polling interval or the higher kern.maxfiles setting increased its workload. The FreeBSD gamin port/pkg does not include these files: /.gaminrc /usr/local/etc/gamin/gaminrc /usr/local/etc/gamin/mandatory_gaminrc These files can be used to tune polling frequency. >How-To-Repeat: Increase kern.maxfiles to a large number (~24k here) run gam_server and then start several jails; run desktop sessions; untar and compile several large source packages - anything to make your file system busy. The application will begin to consume a large portion of CPU. >Fix: Reducing gam_server's polling frequency from the default setting seems to work. I did this by creating the following files: ~/.gaminrc /usr/local/etc/gamin/gaminrc # /usr/local/etc/gamin/gaminrc # # reduce polling frequency to once per 10 seconds # in order to lower CPU load fsset ufs poll 10 # all ufs mounts fsset zfs poll 10 # does this work? Perhaps a default /usr/local/etc/gamin/gaminrc or /usr/local/etc/gamin/mandatory_gaminrc could be included with the port that documented some of the possible configuration settings and defaults for gam_server. >Release-Note: >Audit-Trail: >Unformatted:
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