Hi,
From: Prabu Subroto [mailto:prabusubroto@yahoo.com] Dear my friends....
I wonder why my SuSE Linux 8.1 becomes very slow sometimes. It becomes slow if my harddisk suddenly being busy because of an unknown process. I guess because fsck but I am not sure.
I hope it's not fsck, because it needs an unmounted filesystem. It's rather updatedb, a daemon, which updates the locate-database. It uses find, which produces pretty heavy load (scans all mounted filesystems for files ...). If you recognize such a load try "ps -elf | grep update" and "ps -elf | grep find" and "top" is also a pretty good tool to check for hungry processes.
What is the unknown process actually? And how can I stop /cease it ?
updatedb is started from the root-crontab, you may change settings there or even disable it.
Thank you very much in advance.
you're welcome, Stefan