[oclug] Linux, acting up after boot up.

[Tom De Mulder]

On Wed, 10 Jan 2001, Blashy - none - wrote:

>My RH Linux 7.0 really starts to "crunch" after about 5 minutes of being 
>booted up and running.
>The HDD starts crunching like crazy for a good minute. It's as if it was 
>accessing something, but I don't have a clue.

This is probably the slocate database being rebuilt (locate being the tool
you can use to quickly find a file on the system). In previous versions of
Red Hat, this was scheduled to be run by Cron at 1am by default, but
because a lot of people don't leave their workstations running at night (I
presume) they changed this to "just after bootup".

If you check the processes running when the harddisk's crunching (with ps
or top), you should see a process called "updatedb", which is building a
giant table of files on the system.

-- 
Tom De Mulder.