On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, Chris Stark wrote:
On Wed, 2005-10-12 at 11:24 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote:
[ snip -- well-written tirade :) ]
Since there is at least one person who posted a question on this
topic, I suppose there are others out there like me who are
annoyed and worried by this tool.
My workstation in the office is a 1GHz PIII with 1.25GB RAM running FC4.
It's not a super fast system, but it works for web programming.
It seems like every day when I'm working, prelink inevitably launches
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
when I'm doing something important and pegs my processor at 100% for
often-times over two to three hours. Like Mike said, there's not really
anything anywhere stating why I should just sit back and let my
productivity be cut in half for a portion of every day while my system
struggles to do ANYTHING other than prelink.
Notwithstanding the later discussion about the value or lack of value of
prelink, one might ask why it is interrupting you. Tasks in
/etc/cron.daily are cheduled to kick off at 4:02 am.
If your machine is off at night, then the daily cron job won't run. In
that case, anacron kicks off cron.daily tasks 65 minutes after booting up.
So if you don't want to endure the load of daily maintenance tasks, leave
your machine on. If you don't want to do that, you can adjust the start
time of cron in /etc/crontab and the delay for anacron in /etc/anacron.
If the benefits and rationale for using prelink are documented anywhere,
I sincerely would be interested in viewing this. Otherwise, the claim of
it significantly speeding anything up is made moot by the fact that the
system is virtually unusable when prelink is running.
Also, is everyone in on this discussion sure that it is prelink that is
providing the load? slocate.cron can run for a long time on large
filesystems. I've seen occasional problems with logrotate where buggy
specs in /etc/logrotate.d cause runaway creation of rotated logs. When
this happens, you'll spot it if you "ls -R /var/log".
I ran into one of these a while back (before Fedora, IIRC), and by the
time I figured out the problem, logrotate was starting at 4am and running
until 11am trying to rotate several thousand empty or almost empty log
files. The load was up and the disk drive was hammered the entire time.
I don't want this to turn into my own little tirade or a flamewar, but I
do think Mike is justified in his claim that the software is of
questionable value, especially if there is little information available
other than firsthand experience of it behaving undesirably.
Reading mailing lists is bound to result in your seeing much of the
firsthand experience of undesirable behavior. Most people who are running
without problems don't post to mailing lists about it.
Aloha,
--
Matthew Saltzman
Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs
