Suggestion: controlling the load average
I think the Debian installation tools need something to monitor the load
average, to prevent systems from [ct]rashing during install. Cfr. sendmail
which stops processing mail when it detects that the load average is above a
specified threshold.
A lot of programs start update-menus in the background upon installation. If
you install (or upgrade) 50 of them, you get 50 running update-menus processes
fighting for CPU cycles. [ correction: according to some people, this is not
normal behavior, so it must be a bug in the current update-menus on PPC ]
It may sound hard to update all helper scripts (like update-menus) used for
installation, but even adding a simple load average check to dpkg only would
cure most of the problems. If you do that dpkg just pauses until the load
average is lower, i.e. until the background scripts are finished.
This idea was inspired by the problem I had with update-menus, where they all
kept running in the background when I did `apt-get upgrade -u'. All those
update-menus processes consumed CPU cycles and tried to exhaust memory (I
`only' have 128 MB in my PPC box).
Greetings,
Geert
--
Geert Uytterhoeven ----------------- Sony Suprastructure Center Europe (SUPC-E)
Geert.Uytterhoeven@sonycom.com ------------------- Sint Stevens Woluwestraat 55
Phone +32-2-7248632 Fax +32-2-7262686 ---------------- B-1130 Brussels, Belgium
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