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Subject: RE: Updatedb grinding floppy drive
Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2006 16:10:16 -0000
Message-ID: <B74CF8E243E50A43B2562370EBD9DBEC7E4016@heis-2000server.heis.co.uk>
From: "Phil Betts" <Phil DOT Betts AT heis DOT co DOT uk>
To: "Dai Conrad" <dai DOT conrad AT gmail DOT com>, <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
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Dai Conrad wrote on Monday, February 27, 2006 1:05 AM::

> I've been having a problem with updatedb for a while now.  The
> symptoms are that late in the process it starts grinding my A: drive
> and I have to hit ctrl-C to kill it.  
>
...
> 
> Any suggestions or recommendations will be greatly appreciated. 

I don't know what find is up to, but you're unlikely to want to have A:
in your locatedb, so your first stop should be:

$ man updatedb

and search for "prune".

It pays to tune your locatedb generation to suit your own system.

Due to mount points, files are likely to appear several times in the
database if not tuning is performed, which is pretty wasteful (both in
terms of disk space, and the amount of time and disk thrashing spent
indexing the same directory tree multiple times).  Unless you need
locate to show you all possible ways to refer to a file, you can reduce
the database redundancy using a combination of --prunepaths and
--localpaths.

E.g. my crontab runs something like the following:

/usr/bin/updatedb --localpaths="/ /c" --prunepaths='/c/cygwin /cygdrive
/a /d /usr/bin /usr/lib'

You can read this as:
- Index / (i.e. C:\cygwin) and C: (mounted on /c)
- Omit /c/cygwin as that's already covered by /.
- Omit /cygdrive because that would access other filesystems.
- Omit /a and /d (mountpoints for my floppy and DVD drives
respectively).
- /usr/bin is mounted as /bin and /usr/lib as /lib, so there is no point
in indexing either /usr/bin or /usr/lib because they're already covered
by /bin and /lib.

HTH

Phil
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