On Sun, 1 May 2005, sly wrote:
i installed fc3 1 week ago and since some weired things are happening. out of nowhere the hdd starts going off like crazy, the cpu runs at 100%, the temperature goes up. all these are caused by "makewhatis". witch i don't know how it started and why. and worst of all is that i can't kill it! anybody had experience this?
It's part of regular daily system maintenance. makewhatis creates a database of summaries of man pages to answer queries like "man -k", "apropos", and "whatis". It's fairly disk-intensive, but shouldn't take more than a few minutes.
The other disk-intensive daily operation is updatedb, which builds the database for "locate". That command lists paths to all files where the path containts a particular string. It's much faster than "find", but requires an up-to-date database. Again, it shouldn't take more than a few minutes each day.
You can shut these off if you want by removing scripts in /etc/cron.daily, but you will find that the usefulness of the commands these databases support will decay over time--if you don't run updatedb regularly, you won't be able to "locate" files added since the last updatedb, and if you don't run makewhatis, you won't be able to "apropos" man pages added after the last makewhatis.
-- Matthew Saltzman
Clemson University Math Sciences mjs AT clemson DOT edu http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs
