This morning I looked in at my Thinkpad T30 (1.8GHz P4M) after it had
been running a screensaver all night, and found that everything
user-interactive had slowed to a crawl.
The first major offender was yum-updatesd. I killed that, and found
that the load average went down to about 16. Not sure what it was
before. /etc/yum/yum-updates.conf says that it should check for new
updates every hour (3600 seconds) and the program is started from one
of the /etc/rc.d files at boot time. It does something else every 10
minutes (600 seconds). I don't know what happens if yum-updatesd is
started while a previous instance of it is still running.
Eventually I used top(1) to discover that prelink and beagle-crawl
were using most of the remaining resources, sometimes using lots of
CPU cycles and always stuck in I/O wait. Prelink finally finished at
11:50, I think that Beagle-crawl has finished by now, and Mlocate and
Makewhatis finished at 12:01. All of these and a few other things
were fired off by cron from /etc/cron.daily, starting at 04:02.
1) why are several I/O intensive storage crawlers running at the same
time? Shouldn't they run serially, one after another?
2) is the "startup time" saved by prelink ever recovered from the time
spent running the prelink program?
3) is all of this necessary on a daily basis?
carl
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carl lowenstein marine physical lab u.c. san diego
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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