As the fam maintainer (or is it the debian package maintainer? I don't now) did not fix that bug for several years now I gave up waiting for a solution.
I am not a linux guru at all and this solution may be kinda home-style cooking, but for me it works. 1. Create a file named famdguard in a directory of your choice <YourDir> with the following content: --- snip -------------------------------------------------------- #!/bin/sh set -x COUNT=0 # init the loop control variable USAGE=100 # Check three times if the famd process is above xx% # Restart fam if that is the case. # Set MAXUSAGE to 80 for a single core machine # Set it to 45 for a dual core machine (one processor completely used) # Set it to 22 for a quad core machine (one processor completely used) MAXUSAGE=45 while [ 0$USAGE -gt $MAXUSAGE ]; do # get the cpu usage for the fam process USAGE=`ps -eo pcpu,pid -o comm= | sort -k1 -n -r | grep famd | awk '{ print $1 }'` # remove the fractional part of the cpu usage value USAGE=${USAGE%%.*} # Increment COUNT if fam's cpu usage is above MAXUSAGE [ 0$USAGE -gt $MAXUSAGE ] && COUNT=`expr $COUNT + 1` if [ $COUNT -gt 2 ]; then # Three times high CPU usage. Stop and Restart famd /etc/init.d/fam stop # Check, if it was successfull or try to kill famd ps -e | grep famd [ $? -eq 0 ] && killall -9 famd # Restart fam /etc/init.d/fam start exit fi # Wait some time before the next loop sleep 30 done --- snap -------------------------------------------------------- This file checks for the CPU usage of fam. If it is above the MAXUSAGE it checks two times more with a delay of 30 seconds. If CPU usage is above MAXUSAGE 3 times the fam deamon is stopped and started again. 2. make that file executable $ chmod +x <YourDir>/famdguard 3. add the following line into your /etc/crontab to perform the check every 10 minutes # Check for famd running wild */10 * * * * root /<YourDir>/famdguard -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]