rawhide report: 20050417 changes

[Ron Yorston]

Jeff Spaleta <jspaleta at gmail.com> wrote:
>I'm still desperately trying to understand exactly why
>people who do regular system boots want anacron running.. at all. If
>slocate as spawned by anacron causes a problem.. an hour after
>bootup.. surely prelink is going to be noticable too as well as other
>default scripts.

Yes, I definitely notice when prelink is running, as it causes even more
disk rattling than updatedb.

There's a conflict of interest here.  When I start up my laptop it's
because I want to work on it.  I'd also like it to perform the
housekeeping cron jobs, and the only time it can do that is when the
system is running.  Which by definition is when I want to use it myself.

So I would like the cron jobs to run, I just don't want them to impact
on the performance of the machine when I'm trying to use it.  I've got
a tower system which is also only switched on when I want to use it and
I'm not really bothered by the cron jobs there because it's much faster
and has better disk bandwidth than the laptop.

The problem isn't anacron, it's the jobs that it runs.  If they were
less intrusive I wouldn't mind them, after all, they're doing useful
work for me.

I'm sure there are various approaches to mitigating the impact of
the cron jobs:  having them cache more information so they have to
do less work when they run or throttling the CPU or disk bandwidth
they can use, for example.

Ron