[Techtalk] updatedb hard drive thrashing

Meredydd meredydd at everybuddy.com
Mon Jun 23 21:56:29 EST 2003


This, as people have explained, is fairly normal behaviour, and rather vital. 
However, it's unusual for it to run at any time when you're awake...normally 
it's set to run at 4 in the morning or something.

Check:

(*)	That your computer's clock's set to the right time. It may be thinking 
it's 4 in the morning when it's mid-afternoon...
(*)	That the cron job is running at the appropriate time. Check in 
/etc/crontab (you may need to use the "crontab" command to change it, 
depending on how fussy your cron daemon is) - "man crontab" will tell you a 
lot about the format, but ask here for help if you're having trouble.

Meredydd

On Sunday 22 June 2003 14:36, ed orphan wrote:
> I'm running Red Hat 7.3 and every so often,
> while I have KDE going, the hard drive starts
> to work very very hard. It sounds like it's thrashing.
> So I got into root and ran top. The problem seems
> to be a program called   updatedb.
> It was gobbling up CPU time and working the
> hard drive very hard.
> Is updatedb an important program? Can I axe it?
> What does it do?
> Even when I close down KDE, and exit the user
> account, and I'm just in root on the command line,
> it keeps going. I have to do a shutdown and re-boot
> to make it stop thrashing the hard drive.
> Does anyone else have this problem?
> Any information on  updatedb would be most welcome!



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