Re: Trimming priority:standard
Hi,
>> s/daemon/cron job/g
>
> Then I disagree with your claim about «very significant overhead». Even
> on spinning rust, mlocate is pretty quick since it does a good bunch of
> optimisations to avoid re-indexing unchanged directories. Maybe your
> perception has been marred by slocate and the original locate, which at
> least used not to have such optimisations?
I've seen multiple machines, including older machines of myself, to be
under full disk load for at least several minutes due to (some form of)
locate - every time the cronjob runs. The slowdown was noticeable,
whenever locate did it's job, tasks like starting Firefox or listing
large directories got significantly slower. If this were done on
battery, the remaining runtime would drain much quicker than necessary.
Has mlocate already been the default in Squeeze? Maybe there were some
improvements during the last year or so - uninstalling (all forms of)
locate is pretty much the first thing I do on any Debian machine someone
not experienced in Debian puts in front of me (together with exim, nfs,
rpcbind). Hence I wouldn't even notice if this improved.
Finally, even if mlocate improved the situation significantly, many
people installing Debian (if not most of them) will have mlocate
installed (if you don't know exactly what you are doing, you *will*
select something called "standard tools") without ever using it. So even
the slightest amount of work it does, is wasted.
Kind regards
Ralf
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