Processing triggers for man-db lasting extremely long

[Thomas]

Installing any package is triggering man-db and it is taking 1 minute or more to complete stucking at following message:

Processing triggers for man-db (2.9.0-2) ...

There is no further message in journal or anywhere giving a clue about an underlying problem. The system is hosted on a SSD. During waiting time there is no process running high.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 20.04
Package: man-db 2.9.0-2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.3.0-24.26-generic 5.3.10
Uname: Linux 5.3.0-24-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: zfs zunicode zavl icp zcommon znvpair nvidia_modeset nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu15
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Wed Jan 8 11:13:00 2020
InstallationDate: Installed on 2019-12-19 (20 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 19.10 "Eoan Ermine" - Release amd64 (20191017)
SourcePackage: man-db
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to focal on 2019-12-21 (17 days ago)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Tom Colley (tcolley)]

I've had this same problem but on Ubuntu 18.04

[Tom Colley (tcolley)]

I tried one of the solutions/workarounds at https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/626866/processing-triggers-for-man-db-not-building-database-man-db-auto-update-is-not The solution was to run the following command to allow updates to man-db

sudo touch /var/lib/man-db/auto-update

This worked for me.

[SergeiS (sergei-redleafsoft)]

I've got so annoyed by slow man-db updates, so I actually took time to look for the solution. It takes good 40 seconds on my otherwise super duper fast machine.

 root  ~  ls -lh /var/lib/man-db/auto-update
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Nov 5 2018 /var/lib/man-db/auto-update
 root  ~  cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=18.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=bionic
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Linux Lite 4.0"
 root  ~  dpkg -l man-db
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name Version Architecture Description
+++-===============================-====================-====================-====================================================================
ii man-db 2.8.3-2ubuntu0.1 amd64 on-line manual pager

[James Hadley (james-hadley-6)]

I've had the same problem since installing Ubuntu 20.04 a week ago.

Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS
64-bit
Gnome version: 3.36.8
Windowing system: X11

Intel Core i5-2430M CPU @ 2.40GHz × 4

[Dorian (marchal-dorian)]

Same issue here, installed Ubuntu 20.04 yesterday and all `apt install` take a lot of time on "Processing triggers for man-db".

Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS
64-bit
Gnome version: 3.36.8
Windowing system: X11

11th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-1185G7 @ 3.00GHz × 8

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I'm working on this in https://gitlab.com/cjwatson/man-db/-/merge_requests/2.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package man-db - 2.10.0-2

---------------
man-db (2.10.0-2) unstable; urgency=medium

  * Fix occasional mandb-symlink-target-timestamp test failure.

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Fri, 04 Feb 2022 19:21:06 +0000

[Fred (eldmannen+launchpad)]

I had a similar issue where the system load would be very high when installing packages. The issue disappeared after uninstall the gnome-menus package.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Fred, in that case it is unlikely to be related to this bug.