Jonathan Thornburg wrote: ... > Some of the /etc/weekly stuff (eg rebuilding locatedb) involves > walking all (non-NFS) mounted filesystems, so it really eats disk > seek bandwidth, i.e., it makes the machine painfully slow for most > other use while it's running. So, only a human can decide when a > good "quiet" time is to run the disk-cruncher. No automatic scheme > can avoid being at a bad time occasionally for some users.
There are a lot of things I'd love to have a "disknice" command for. When you have a process that chews disk but not processor, and you want it to be the last priority when multiple tasks want the disk at the same time, "disknice /usr/local/bin/thrash"... This would be one of them. Just one of them. however, maybe locate.updatedb could be adjusted to put an optional delay between disk queries... not sure if that would have the intended effect, however. Would probably have to be optional...not sure I'd want to slow down the rebuild process on some of my machines. On the other hand...if they took several days, not sure that would be bad for something that only runs once a week anyway. just what this thread needed. more ill-considered babble without code. Nick.
