On Fri, 20 Nov 2009, Alec T. Habig wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> When users are running nautilus on a machine where their directories are
> nfs-mounted, nautilus spends a substantial fraction of the client
> machine's CPU, ~1.5Mbps of bandwidth, and a large load on the server's
> nfsd I/O wait states.  It looks like it is constantly stat'ing all the
> files it can, although I haven't confirmed that with strace.
>
> Initially the problem was with the gamin daemon doing the same thing,
> but one can ask it not to do so by adding
>
>  fsset nfs none
>
> to /etc/gamin/gaminrc
>
> and it behaves.  The problem then moves to nautilus itself, which acts
> as if it's not satisfied with the gamin's lack of up-to-the-second
> response and tries to do it itself.
>
> Anyone know of a way to configure nautilus to behave?  The alternative
> is to annoy my users by making them all switch to kde instead, but
> that's better than letting gnome DOS my nfs server.
>
>       thanks,
>       Alec
>
> PS - SL5.4, although it also happened (with less dire consequences) in
> SL5.3.

I've not yet tested things properly on sl54 but for sl53 we tweaked the 
gamin config to tell it to poll the nfs servers less agressivly, and to 
hack a couple of other paths which gamin was being confused about (somehow 
it was convinced that they supported inotify but they don't)...

   $ cat /etc/gamin/gaminrc
   # $Id: gaminrc,v 1.2 2009/01/22 00:37:56 jp107 Exp $
   #
   # Teach gamin to poll these paths since in DAMTP they are symlinks to
   # NFS but it thinks they can be checked with inotify - and they can't!
   poll /var/spool/mail/* /var/mail/* 30
   #
   # This should be enough to set the poll interval for 'nfs' type
   # file-systems - otherwise it defaults to polling every 10 seconds...
   #fsset nfs poll 30
   fsset nfs poll 20

in sl53 nautilus was only causing gamin to poll a few bits of the home 
directory (e.g. ~/Desktop/) every 10 seconds so it wasn't a really _big_ 
problem.

I'm guessing that if gamin is told it can't monitor NFS then nautilus may 
do some polling itself...

  -- Jon