Gamin is a file and directory monitoring system defined to be a subset of the
FAM (File Alteration Monitor) system. This is a service provided by a library
which allows to detect when a file or a directory has been modified.
Whereas the FreeBSD port of FAM polls files every few seconds, this port
includes a kqueue(2) backend for immediate notification of most alterations.
===> The following configuration options are available for gamin-0.1.10_10:
GAM_POLLER=off: Use gamin's poller instead of kqueue's
LIBINOTIFY=off: Use libinotify as the FAM backend
RUN_AS_EUID=on: Drop privileges to effective user
===> Use 'make config' to modify these settings
Gamin will only provide realtime notification of changes for at most n files,
where n is the minimum value between (kern.maxfiles * 0.7) and
(kern.maxfilesperproc - 200). Beyond that limit, files will be polled.
If you often open several large folders with Nautilus, you might want to
increase the kern.maxfiles tunable (you do not need to set
kern.maxfilesperproc, since it is computed at boot time from kern.maxfiles).
The behavior of gamin can be controlled via the various gaminrc files.
See http://www.gnome.org/~veillard/gamin/config.html on how to create
these files. In particular, if you find gam_server is taking up too much
CPU time polling for changes, something like the following may help
in one of the gaminrc files:
# reduce polling frequency to once per 10 seconds
# for UFS file systems in order to lower CPU load
fsset ufs poll 10
