updatedb.mlocate causes long time high ntfs-3g IO usage
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
mlocate (Ubuntu) |
Confirmed
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
Binary package hint: mlocate
Computer was extremely sluggish, but CPU usage showed nothing. Looked at IORR column in htop and found that ntfs-3g kept quite active (value around 60).
I traced this IO usage to updatedb.mlocate, which was processing the /mnt/xp mount (which I set up in my fstab last night).
Examining /etc/updatedb.conf shows that:
- /mnt is not included in PRUNEPATHS, but /media is.
- "ntfs-3g" is not included in PRUNEFS.
Adding either seems to have fixed my issue. I consider it a bug since for some reason it causes extreme IO load to do the updatedb on ntfs-3g. The machine was nearly unusable for several hours until I found the issue.
aav@dello:~$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 9.04
Release: 9.04
Not sure if this will help for ntfs, but I changed my mlocate cronjob to launch updatedb.mlocate with an "idle" io priority. So the last lines of /etc/cron. daily.mlocate look like:
##
# See ionice(1) "/usr/bin/ ionice -c3"
if [ -x /usr/bin/ionice ] &&
/usr/bin/ionice -c3 true 2>/dev/null; then
IONICE=
fi
$IONICE /usr/bin/ updatedb. mlocate
This should probably be accompanied by a nice 19, to also reduce actual userspace CPU stress.