Tony Earnshaw wrote:
Since you started this exchange and I felt bitten, I've looked harder at
Courier IMAP (latest) and what it uses of libraries and what they use of
services. ldding etc on Courier shows that if I have gamin base and
gamin-devel installed and build Courier IMAP, Courier will use the gamin
libraries, which call gam_server, whether I want that or not. My entire
famd base work has been utterly useless, since it never gets used on
RHAS4.
Yes, I found the same thing when I had fam and gamin installed at the
same time. But if I compiled against gamin and gamin-devel, then
removed gamin and gamin-devel and installed your fam-base RPM and
started the service, Courier would use fam. Something though gives
starting gam_server pref. over using the running famd... Oh well, both
use Linux's dnotify kernel support by default. Gamin is just a
simplified (no rpc or NFS) version of the fam API. If I were you, and
it was working with gamin even if you didn't know it, I'd leave it.
On another note, I have started testing out gamin with inotify
support (vanilla linux kernel 2.6.15.6), I've found that it solves
the issues I previously had with fam/gamin eating 100% cpu after some
time (especially with large, 100k+ message Maildirs). Everything
I've read about the old dnotify service (which is what RHEL4 has by
default) has been bad.
They never done that on our Red Hat RHAS4 so-called 2.6.9-34 (update 3)
server. The most files I had in a (now I realize it :) gamin-regulated
server folder was 27,500, way below your 100,000 but way above your
second mark, 10,000.
Care to give it a try? I would love independent confirmation that I'm
hitting a fam/dnotify design limitation rather than a boneheaded mistake
in my config. I found that as soon as I started working with 50,000+
messages in a Maildir with Thunderbird, famd would suck up 99% cpu and
would never come back down... You can just use TB to copy all messages
from that 27k folder into a test folder multiple times and that should
do it. I haven't tried this with gamin in awhile but I believe it does
the same. My theory is that famd is getting the notice from dnotify
that there have been changes to a folder (that's all dnotify says, it
doesn't say "new file created" or "x file modified", just "the folder
has changed"). Famd then has to go and find the changes and in a folder
of 50k+ files, famd freaks out and can't handle it.
The fact that you even *dare* to employ kernel
2.6.15.6 (15 kernel??? never in the world on a Red Hat supported system
- ours have been proved to run 24x7 for many months at a time without
rebooting) tickles the fancy that you might be using Centos, rather than
Red Hat.
Nope, this is a RHEL4 AS box, just upgraded to U3 in fact. I downloaded
the vanilla kernel source for 2.6.15.6 and copied over the RHEL4
kernel's .config then ran a make oldconfig. Making sure I enabled
inotify support. So far it's been stable. I know, I just took away one
of the major advantages of RHEL4 in that I'm not running a supported
config but I don't have RHEL4 support anyway, we're educational and we
pay $50 for the ISOs and updates a year. It might be possible to
backport the inotify patches to 2.6.9 RHEL4 kernels and I might look
into that in the future, but for now I'm happy that I have ENHANCED IDLE
support without fear of gamin or famd going berserk.
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