On Saturday 27 May 2006 08:28, Orn E. Hansen wrote:
I've been a bit amazed over the years, of the intense "updates" that usually are run in the cron, during the night times. Several times, I've been playing games, or just browsing the net on my desktop, during early morning hours, when my computer has gone to sleep when running the cron update. Usually this is a period, of a whole hour, and sometimes more. I've often mentioned it, and despite that this function is reduntant function from the old batch time hours of Unix, nobody has bothered removing it from the desktop linux environment.
Er, yes they have, it's disabled by default and only enabled if you expressly install the findutils-locate package manually Personally I like locate, it's by far the fastest way to find a file I have at my disposal
However, now when I write this, my machine is doing this horrible update of all manuals, which nobody reads anymore.
Call me nobody
And rebuilding the structure of the entire files system (exageration, running several recursive finds), for what purpose only geniuses can figure.
Updating the locate database
But I've finally been able to work on my machine while it was doing this. On all other occasions, even with a AMD64 3000+, my machine went to sleep ... and I could hardly browse the desktop during this hour of nonsense. But now, yes now I CAN ... but it took a desktop with a dual core CPU to do it. Go figure :-)
No, I would say the CPU has next to nothing to do with this. The job is so heavily I/O bound that your CPU power is almost irrelevant. If you have problems working while the job is running, you might want to have a look at your DMA settings for the hard drives