fam - what is it?

[richard lyons <richard@the-place.net>]

Ok, it a file alteration monitor.  but why?  

Kmail froze up in horror at a trivial post I tried to send.  Kmail 
does this occasionally, but this time there was only one xterm and 
kmail running. So, I looked at top and pamd was king of the castle.  
Eight hours later, nothing had changed:
-----------------
top - 01:24:04 up 1 day, 22:29,  2 users,  load average: 1.05, 1.08, 1.05
Tasks:  91 total,   5 running,  86 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  27.3% user,  72.7% system,   0.0% nice,   0.0% idle
Mem:    192076k total,   185932k used,     6144k free,    34448k buffers
Swap:   982792k total,     8484k used,   974308k free,    57540k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND           
  756 richard   17   0  1752 1724 1116 R 97.7  0.9   2048:12 famd              
19253 root      13   0  1068 1068  840 R  1.3  0.6   6:41.74 top               
 1436 root       5 -10 22584  11m 3020 S  1.0  6.3   6:36.99 XFree86           
    1 root       8   0   508  476  452 S  0.0  0.2   0:00.29 init              
    2 root       9   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.86 keventd           
-----------------

I killed kmail, wondering if it had started famd doing whatever it
was up to. But still top showed the same picture. So I restarted fam,
and, hey presto:
-----------------
top - 01:32:25 up 1 day, 22:38,  2 users,  load average: 0.61, 0.92, 0.98
Tasks:  81 total,   1 running,  80 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):   0.7% user,   1.6% system,   0.0% nice,  97.7% idle
Mem:    192076k total,   163920k used,    28156k free,    36044k buffers
Swap:   982792k total,     8456k used,   974336k free,    58912k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND           
15370 root      15   0  1060 1060  840 R  1.0  0.6   0:00.25 top               
  773 root      10   0   580  540  488 S  0.3  0.3   0:19.48 gpm               
 1436 root       8 -10 22524  11m 3020 S  0.3  6.3   6:39.79 XFree86           
    1 root       8   0   508  476  452 S  0.0  0.2   0:00.29 init              
    2 root       9   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.86 keventd           
-----------------
So, my question is: why is fam running? How does it get into this 
greedy mode?  What is it really for?

I notice that keventd remains there after the only kde application
was killed.  Is this one of the processes that kde apps leave running,
as mentioned by someone yesterday?

TIA
-- 
richard