I run RHEL 4 ES on my workstation at work and have noticed there are times when I am doing work that involves high I/O on my harddrive that gam_server will use excessively high amounts of memory and CPU.
I have searched high and low on a way to disable this process and could not find one that worked for me. There is however the following the may work for you:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=210329&highlight=gam_serverLike I said, it did not work for me. What I ultimately did to disable it was rename the gam_server binary and kill the gam_server process. When it tries to respawn, the binary is "no longer there".
- mv /usr/libexec/gam_server /usr/libexec/gam_server.old
EDIT: One thing I noticed when disabling gam_server when using "Open..." in programs to open files, it could be really slow. Since gam_server is used to monitor file alterations and is no longer running I think that caused the system to do scans instead of hitting some cache. Not positive, but know there are risks.
