Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 27 Jul 2007 09:42:27 -0700 | From | "Ray Lee" <> | Subject | Re: solving(?) the updatedb problem w/ the kernel cache |
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On 7/27/07, Douglas J Hunley <doug@hunley.homeip.net> wrote: > I've been following lkml for a little while (not understanding it all, but > following nonetheless <g>) and I've noticed that in a lot of the talks about > schedulers, elevators, and performance, the issue of running updatedb and its > effects on the kernel's fs cache seems to recur. I've also yet to see anyone > present a solution that others think is worth pursuing. I'm curious why we're > trying to solve the problem, when we can simply avoid the problem to begin > with by making use of inotify and introducing a new user-space > daemon, 'located'.
inotify doesn't scale for lots of directories. I have about 18,000 directories under ~ on my laptop, and that's with a few source trees that I use infrequently tarballed up.
But yes, if we had a full filesystem events notifier, then we could just toss updatedb aside and have the benefit of a live index into the system. It's been suggested before, at least by me. Other projects want this as well, such as an on-demand virus scanner, or a live backup to another site, or beagle/tracker who would like to index documents on the fly. beagled already uses inotify, I think, but as it takes over my system (in a bad way) whenever I tried to run it, I had no choice but to remove it.
Perhaps it was choking on the 18k subdirectories, dunno.
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