Konqueror makes FAM / Gamin go nuts

[Dik Takken]

Hi,

Until just a few weeks ago, I used FAM for file access notification. The 
problem with FAM was that when you were watching a directory with files 
that change very quickly, FAM could go nuts and start consuming all 
available CPU. Another nasty thing was that FAM was running as root, so 
users could not kill it in case of emergency.

I recently heard about Gamin, the replacement for FAM that can use 
INotify of recent kernels. Unfortunately the problem of high CPU 
consumption returned. Now it happens from time to time that Gamin starts 
consuming lots of CPU for no clear reason whatsoever. The strange thing is 
that even a Konqueror window that displays a static set of files can 
trigger nuttyness in Gamin. I draw this conclusion from the fact that the 
madness stops when I close a konqueror window with static files in it, and 
the fact that I configured Konqueror to use one independent process for 
every window.

Another observation: Killing Gamin does not always help. A new Gamin 
process is started, which happily continues wasting CPU. It only stops 
when the right Konqueror window is closed.

How can I investigate what is going on? Is this a known problem?

Using KDE 3.5.1 by the way.

Cheers,

Dik