Message: 17 Date: 1 May 2005 18:02:22 -0000 From: sly <dsyc@xxxxx> Subject: Re: makewhatis - out of nowhere To: fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx Message-ID: <20050501180222.11283.qmail@xxxxxxxxxx> Content-Type: TEXT/plain; CHARSET=US-ASCII Matthew Saltzman wrote:
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.
thanx a lot for the info. i will remove it because is on my laptop and it kills the performance for few minutes and i don't use "apropos" that often on my laptop.
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.
sly.
Also check "man anacron" and "man anacrontab". anacron handles running cron jobs that gets missed while the machine is turned off. You are probably seeing these cron jobs run from anacron if you are turning your laptop off at night. Those cron jobs normally would run early in the AM unless you turn the machine off, then they will run at some scheduled interval after the machine is next turned on, from /etc/anacrontab. You could reduce the frequency they run by moving the cron job from cron.daily to cron.weekly or cron.monthly and leaving the machine on during that time period, then those jobs won't run from anacron and everything will be more up2date(though not on a daily basis)!
Bill
