On Sat, 2002-07-06 at 08:27, Mattias Dahlberg wrote: > On Fri, 5 Jul 2002, Todd Lyons wrote: > > > ls -l /etc/cron.daily > > ls -l /etc/cron.hourly > > > > Remove the msec link and you get rid of a small portion of the > > clobbering. Remove the slocate link and you get rid of a good bit of > > the clobbering. Remove the logrotate and you run out of disk space > > soon. It's up to you really. > > Would it be a better idea to make the users who want slocate put it in > cron.dialy instead? And not have it there by default. I say this because > the number one complaint I hear from people trying Mandrake is that the > hard drive thrashing drives them nuts. The association to FastFind.exe is > always made. And rightfully so, if you ask me.
Personally I think, in the spirit of education, there should be a FAQ in some extremely obvious location which says "Why the hell are you thrashing my hard disk like that?" and gives an explanation. When I first noticed this (I *was* up at 4am...) I did a bit of digging which led me to the bits already referenced. This taught me about the slocate command, which i'd known nothing about before, and which I now find ridiculously useful and couldn't live without. The FAQ could explain what slocate is, why it's useful, and how to turn it off if for some inexplicable reason you don't want it. (Photographic memory for the location of every file on the hard disk? Masochistic love of ls -R? who knows? ;>) > > The real question is, "what are you doing up at 4 AM"? :) > > This seems to be the number one misconception among developers, that > everyone has their computers turned on during the night. Many "desktop > users" don't. As simple as that. Which means that *all* the cron.dialy > tasks kick in when they start working on their computer. Well, by default Mandrake seems to use a modified cron called 'anacron', which advertises itself as being a modified cron which is aware of non-24/7 usage. Which would seem to suggest it was chosen for exactly the reason you give. What I didn't read enough to find out is exactly *how* it differs from cron and whether it can be setup to avoid the situation given - maybe someone who knows about anacron's capabilities can comment? -- adamw
