Matthew Saltzman wrote: >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. Leaving machines switched on 24/7 just so that a cron job can run at 0402 is very wasteful. Also, some hardware components for non-server machines aren't qualified to run continuously. Many machines are only switched on when someone want to use them. No amount of fiddling with cron or anacron will then avoid the problem of cron jobs running at some inconvenient moment. >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. Well, I can't speak for everyone, but I'm aware of the different background tasks that are fired off as cron jobs and of their different characteristics. Prelink is most objectionable to me because it's more CPU intensive. On my laptop machine you can tell when prelink starts because the fans turn on and run continuously for however long it takes. Slocate's updatedb is less of a concern because it's mostly limited by disk I/O. I also happen to think that having an up to date slocate database is much more useful to me than whatever advantages prelink might bring. Ron
