updatedb is set to run about an hour after I boot up in the morning. Once it is started, my machine is almost unusable for 10 minutes. Moving windows around the screen is unbearable: sometimes when I move a window I can see X redrawing the screen line by line. If it was any slower I'd just about see pixels forming. Typing into a shell is like being connected at 300 baud with a dodgy modem.
My home machine doesn't suffer from this serious degredation of performance while doing updatedb, and is similar in specs to this work machine. Both home and work have 512MB ram. Although the hard drive at home is a bit better - it has 8MB cache and 7200rpm and is so quiet I don't even know updatedb is running. The work one is much noiser, and has a piddly 512kb cache, as reported by:
# hdparm -i /dev/hdc
/dev/hdc:
Model=ST320413A, FwRev=3.58, SerialNo=6ED3WH4A
Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec Fixed DTR>10Mbs RotSpdTol>.5% }
RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=0
BuffType=unknown, BuffSize=512kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16
CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=39102336
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:240,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
PIO modes: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5
AdvancedPM=no WriteCache=enabled
Drive conforms to: device does not report version: 1 2 3 4 5
Don't know what the motherboard is, but CPU is Athlon XP 1800+ I'm thinking the changes in linux 2.6.x might help - although I'm running 2.4.?? at home (Athlon XP 2000) and don't see this problem.
Question is, to fix this do I need (my boss to) replace:
hard drive motherboard kernel (with 2.6.x) something else
Cheers, Carl.
