Gamin
Gamin is a "File Alteration Monitor"[1] piece of donkey dong which is started like a rouge computer virus by a whole range of GNU/Linux software. You can see this virus hogging CPU[2] and IO[3][4] as a process called "gam_server".
How to get rid of the gam_server virus[edit]
kdelibs can be compiled without the fam support Gamin provides by using immense amounts of resources. Gentoo has a useflag "fam" to remove support for it.
If you already compiled kdelibs with fam support or your distribution comes with pre-buildt packages compiled against Gamin then you can't remove the package because kdelibs - and other packages - supposedly "depend" on this pile-o-donkey-dong. However, there is one very simple way to disable it...:
echo > /usr/libexec/gam_server
..as root. Programs who "need" Gamin don't need it to be running and start - and run - just fine as long as the libraries they are compiled against are installed. Programs who will attempt to infect your memory with the gam_server virus at startup will simply accept that it "failed" to load and move on without fam support if you nuke this extremely annoying viruses executable.
What you'll miss by nuking gam_server[edit]
File Alteration Monitoring basically notifies applications when a file has been modified by another program. Applications who use the poorly implemented Gamin virus to learn abour file modifications will no longer bother you if some file is changed outside that application.
You'll also notice that your computer don't become unbarably slow every time you start an application who uses gam_server (It must be mentioned that programs who start gam_server think you want this virus running after you quit them, just in case you'll start some other program who "benefits" from it's trashy code).
