[lug] lsof and KDE 2.2.2?

[Chris Riddoch]

Hi, everyone.

The 'kdesktop' process from KDE 2.2.2 (or something forked from it) is
continually accessing a friend's ~/Desktop directory with surprising
frequency.  He's running his home directory off an NFS server, and
noticed that the network activity lights were rather active even when
very little file access is going on.

We determined that kdesktop was querying the attributes of ~/Desktop
by a little NFS traffic analysis and the fact that killing kdesktop
stops the queries, but in case the problem isn't with kdesktop but
rather something spawned from it, is there a way to make lsof sit and
watch a particular file and list the processes that access it over
time?  The '-r' option only checks periodically, which isn't good for
noticing processes that run in less than a second.

Now the KDE question is, what's up with kdesktop? He's guessing that
there's an average of 4-10 accesses per second. We suspect that this
polling is probably happening even when ~/Desktop is on a local hard
drive, but aren't sure - I'm not running KDE on my laptop.

I spent a fair chunk of time looking over kdesktop's bug list,
http://bugs.kde.org/db/pa/lkdesktop.html and there don't seem to be
any obviously similar bugs.  Has anybody else seen this behavior, or
is it time to post a bug report to KDE?

-- 
Chris Riddoch       | epistemological
socket at peakpeak.com | humility