Re: gconfd-2 not shutting down

[Cyrille Moureaux <Cyrille Moureaux Sun COM>]

Hi David,

> I'm having trouble with gconfd-2 on a debian sarge based terminal 
> server. The users' gconfd-2 processes won't shut down. I have to kill 
> them once in a while, which is annyoing. Of course I could let a cron 
> job do this, but that's not how it's supposed to be, or is it?
>
> A search on Google, on this list and a quick scan of the FAQ didn't 
> help. The only thing I found out is that gconfd should quit a few 
> minutes after the user's logout. Well, it doesn't. At least not on my 
> system.
>
> The problem is, that it's a public internet access with lots of users 
> every day, so the gconfd processes quickly fill up the process table.
>
> Is this expected behaviour?
>
> I think I probably missed something, since no one else seems to have 
> this problem. But I'm running out of ideas on how to solve it and where 
> to look, so I thought you could maybe help me out and point me in the 
> right direction.
The expected behaviour is the one you've read about, i.e that the GConf 
daemon stops after a few seconds of inactivity (thirty seconds is I 
think the period of the check). It however needs to have no clients at 
the time, and that might be what's causing the issue in your 
environment. It's possible that some other process is keeping a 
connection to the daemon, and that prevents it from ever stopping. I'd 
suggest checking there aren't other processes which query GConf on 
behalf of connected users but never release the client connection to the 
daemon.

Hope this helps,

Cyrille