In the absence of fam , these applications and others like them are forced to poll the filesystem to detect changes.
Applications can request fam to monitor any files or directories in any filesystem.
When fam detects changes to monitored files, it notifies the appropriate application. If asked to monitor files on an NFS mounted filesystem, fam tries to use fam on the NFS server to monitor files. If fam cannot contact a remote fam , it polls the files instead. Disable polling of NFS files. It does not disable use of remote fam on NFS servers, nor does it disable polling of local files.