updatedb is slowing down the system very badly. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Switch on PC. 2. Wait until updatedb starts. 3. Do something else and you'll notice that your harddisk throughput gets very bad. Expected Results: updatedb should sleep when there is other avctivity on the system, especially user activity. Maybe we could enhance the cron/anacron daemons to start/kill updatedb and other extreme load producing processes...
This depends on the system and you're responsible for your system. Edit the cron script(s) to start updatedb with lower priority.
Lower priority does not mean that there won't be signficant disk access. It is already reniced to level 10...
Try starting it with level 19 priority (which I believe is the lowest you can go on Linux), or just delete the cron job and run updatedb manually say once a week (you shouldn't need to run it much more frequently unless your file system is changing a lot).