On 2014-01-10 13:56, James Knott wrote:
Well, I can try. But as I mentioned, when this happens, I can't do anything. Also, why should updating any database be such a performance hit? Shouldn't that sort of activity be given a low priority?
Yes. But for some reason it affects some machines way more than others. In mine, I can do heavy tasks like recoding a dozen videos, using all cpu cores, plus reading and writing from disks, do not make my computer that slugish. Or an rsync backup. But crawling the entire filesystem looking for file names (locate update), or certain cron jobs, even running at low priority, taxes the system more. There is an utility, 'cpulimit', that might be useful to mitigate the issue. Another is 'ionice'. Probably more useful than 'nice'. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 12.3 x86_64 "Dartmouth" at Telcontar)