Judging by the process' use of CPU time compared to the machine's uptime, it seems that this wasn't a result of the machine being idle, especially given that the process was frozen in gdb for some time before I ran 'uptime':
chris@chris-laptop:~$ ps -ef | grep xfce4-v chris 2541 1 97 05:00 ? 07:12:56 /usr/bin/xfce4-volumed
chris@chris-laptop:~$ uptime 12:30:54 up 7:31, 5 users, load average: 0.10, 0.40, 0.84
Judging by the process' use of CPU time compared to the machine's uptime, it seems that this wasn't a result of the machine being idle, especially given that the process was frozen in gdb for some time before I ran 'uptime':
chris@chris- laptop: ~$ ps -ef | grep xfce4-v xfce4-volumed
chris 2541 1 97 05:00 ? 07:12:56 /usr/bin/
chris@chris- laptop: ~$ uptime
12:30:54 up 7:31, 5 users, load average: 0.10, 0.40, 0.84