On Sun, 2007-08-26 at 12:03 +0200, PerAntonRønning wrote: > I have tried to lay a trap. On my backup machine's ssh link to the main > computer I started "top", showing which programs are using most > resources. After some time the machine froze (it was left idle, only > connected to the internet via Firefox), and the program at the top when > it froze was "updateb". That's not conclusive, though. Firefox is as good a candidate as any for being the downfall of your PC, probably even more so. > I did Gooogle for updateb and I found that this is a cron job, that > maybe has caused trouble for others as well (I found a discussion on the > Linux Thinkpad Mailing List). > Does anyone here have any experience with this? > The posting suggested to disable the updatep program, but I am not sure > whether there will be other side-effects of this. Anyone know? Updatedb makes the database used by the locate command (see the the mlocate.cron file in /etc/cron.daily). You can disable it, and lose that functionality. Mine uses minimal resources, though I recall it being a bit of a drag on a seriously underpowered PC that I used to have. It does trawl through almost the entire drive, so if you have any issues with your hard drive, it could be getting stuck thanks to that. There's also a chance that there's a misconfiguration, and it's trying to access things it should leave alone. I recall reading something about there being a problem there, and you can prune off some paths and/or file systems in the /etc/updatedb.conf file. I'm fairly sure that it should be ignoring /proc/ and /sys/ but mine's not explicitly configured to do so. > I also got a tip from a friend of mine, who runs MAC. He also had a > similar kind of instability, and after running a memory analysis program > he discovered faulty memory. > Anyone else having similar experiences? I can't say that I have, but you can run memtest86+ to test your menu. It's available on the install discs, just boot it, and run it for quite some time. You want to go through at least a couple of iterations of the tests. If you get an error message, you've got a problem. It could be the RAM, or what's using it (all the bits between it and the CPU, including the CPU). Ignore such errors at your peril. Memory usage is something that you need zero errors with. -- [tim@bigblack ~]$ uname -ipr 2.6.22.1-41.fc7 i686 i386 Using FC 4, 5, 6 & 7, plus CentOS 5. Today, it's FC7. Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
