Re: anacron

[Pietro Cagnoni <pcagnoni@mclink.net>]

Christian Schoenebeck wrote:
> 
> Hi!
> 
> I'm using anacron on my router (just an old 486) and everytime anacron is
> running a job, it's hard to do anything else with it (e.g. takes about 5
> seconds or so just to get a login prompt and it takes a minute or more to get
> a small internet site). I know anacron is running its jobs with 'nice' by
> default so it should already have a very low process priority but can I do
> anything to improve this behaviour?
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> Christian Schoenebeck

the problem is disk activity, not cpu load. nice won't help much.

the most disk-intensive of the anacron jobs are checksecurity and
updatedb, because they have to scan all the filesystem. i suppose it's
better not to remove checksecurity, but you can easily disable the
updatedb script - grep about in /etc/cron.daily .

if your machine acts just as a router, maybe the best thing is to reduce
the filesistem complexity by removing unnecessary packages.

you can also edit /etc/crontab to move the anacron jobs to different
hours.

pietro.