Re: updatedb cron job never finishes

[Douglas Allan Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca>]

On Tue, May 29, 2007 at 09:42:30AM -0700, Jason Dunsmore wrote:
> 
> Whenever updatedb runs via cron, it goes to sleep and never finishes
> the job, leaving all these processes running:
> 
> 29519 ?        S      0:00 /USR/SBIN/CRON
> 29520 ?        Ss     0:00 /bin/sh -c test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / 
> && run
> 29521 ?        S      0:00 /bin/sh -c test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / 
> && run
> 29522 ?        S      0:00 run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily
> 29559 ?        Ss     0:00 /bin/sh /etc/cron.daily/find
> 29561 ?        SN     0:00 /bin/sh /usr/bin/updatedb
> 29569 ?        SN     0:00 /bin/sh /usr/bin/updatedb
> 29572 ?        SN     0:00 /usr/bin/sort -z -f
> 29573 ?        SN     0:00 /usr/lib/locate/frcode -0
> 29577 ?        SN     0:00 su nobody -s /bin/sh -c /usr/bin/find / 
> -ignore_readd
> 29578 ?        SN     0:01 /usr/bin/find / -ignore_readdir_race ( -fstype 
> NFS -o
> 
> What could be causing this?  It happens on Etch for x86 and AMD64.
> 

What happens if you run the command in /etc/cron.daily manually as root?

As always, I'll suggest doing it with X not runing and run it from the
command line.  In this case, I'd suggest you run top in another vt and
watch things from there, especially idle% and wa% (waiting for io).

Doug.