Following up with an addendum:
David Guntner grabbed a keyboard and wrote:
>
> Now, on my main desktop, I keep two windows always open, one running top
> and the other tailing the syslog. Top was showing a load in excess of
> 5.00 (which I think is a bit excessive...) and was gradually going down.
> The only thing of possible note that I could see in they syslog was
> that dbus (I don't remember seeing those messages in squeeze, so I'm
> guessing this is new and I'm wondering if it's something I actually
> need, but that's a different story :-) ) had just activated a service
> called org.freedesktop.PackageKit using service helper, and about 20
> seconds after that was two messages saying that rsyslogd had been HUPed
> (this is not during the time when logrotate runs, so I'm pretty sure it
> wasn't logrotate that HUPed it).
I just discovered that the upgrade "thoughtfully" added anacron back to
my system (I removed it from squeeze because my system is used as a
server, thus is up 24/7, thus doesn't need anacron). I note that
anacron is a "suggests" in the entry for cron (aptitude show cron), so
I'm guessing that apt/aptitude now installs things which are simply
suggested? If that's so, is there a way to turn that off?
It looks like logrotate did in fact run, thanks to the anacron, which
looks like it uses the default values you'd get in /etc/crontab for the
times to run things within its own configuration. Checking the syslog
files confirms that a logrotate did take place at the time the HUPed
message shows up in the log.
Man, I hope that doing log rotation is not what's causing the system to
hang so severely while it's running.... I'll continue to monitor the
situation, and if I get anything new, I'll post here.
--Dave
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