Bug 93413

Summary:	updatedb not sensitive to system usage
Product:	Gentoo Linux	Reporter:	kalium
Component:	[OLD] Core system	Assignee:	Gentoo Linux bug wranglers <bug-wranglers>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX
Severity:	enhancement	CC:	gentoo
Priority:	High
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---

Description kalium 2005-05-21 05:40:57 UTC

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...

Comment 1 Carsten Lohrke (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2005-05-21 06:19:48 UTC

This depends on the system and you're responsible for your system. Edit the cron
script(s) to start updatedb with lower priority.

Comment 2 kalium 2005-05-21 07:25:05 UTC

Lower priority does not mean that there won't be signficant disk access. It is
already reniced to level 10...

Comment 3 Paul Waring 2005-05-21 11:28:17 UTC

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).