updatedb.mlocate should warn if it takes too long / time out

[gpk]

Binary package hint: mlocate

In the course of doing some numerical computations, I've created several tens of millions of small files. (If you're curious, they are a cache of intermediate results; this computation runs for several weeks. And, no, the cache couldn't be drastically smaller without impacting performance.) During that time, I started wondering why the heck my system 's performance was so poor: it would be running it's disk all the time, but nothing that showed up on "top" was doing that much disk activity.

Anyway, it turned out to be updatedb.mlocate grinding away, taking nearly 24 hours to scan my disk. That's fine -- I fixed it by tweaking the configuration file -- but it's hardly the first program you think of checking when your system grinds to a halt. Nor does it really show up as active on "top" because it uses very little CPU time.

Anyhow, life would be more pleasant if updatedb.mlocate recognized it was well outside the bounds of normal operation and sent an e-mail, or left a message in syslog. Something like "mlocate.updatedb still running after 2 hours: either you have a lot of files to index or /etc/updatedb.conf may be misconfigured." One of the configuration options would be the warning timeout interval.

Since mlocate isn't used intensively, and since it's run once per day, the timeout shouldn't be set too high: I'd recommend 2 hours.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
Package: mlocate 0.22.2-1ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.35-28.50-generic 2.6.35.11
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-28-generic x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Wed Apr 13 09:08:01 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release amd64 (20100816.1)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: mlocate