From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1764339AbXG0Qmk (ORCPT ); Fri, 27 Jul 2007 12:42:40 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1753085AbXG0Qmc (ORCPT ); Fri, 27 Jul 2007 12:42:32 -0400 Received: from wr-out-0506.google.com ([64.233.184.239]:15321 "EHLO wr-out-0506.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752714AbXG0Qmb (ORCPT ); Fri, 27 Jul 2007 12:42:31 -0400 DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=gmail.com; s=beta; h=received:message-id:date:from:sender:to:subject:cc:in-reply-to:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition:references:x-google-sender-auth; b=bhJ2k1gA2hS0IwM8XQDKSh4pe8oeepPjNE9Q+wFTTG2wk/B6QnuWoipBD2Ja73trzvyi7Ee1So2H5gw72RvtPpSBKWPvLQh33xMXDikFMItD/DHM+lIxPgIjYz8AqhlFrQ7Btc+4WNyyheqlNIptKNGYx9j2yBsV/YwUN5FtpmY= Message-ID: <2c0942db0707270942k784890a2ld44d1312dde02379@mail.gmail.com> Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2007 09:42:27 -0700 From: "Ray Lee" To: "Douglas J Hunley" Subject: Re: solving(?) the updatedb problem w/ the kernel cache Cc: slocate@trakker.ca, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org In-Reply-To: <200707270855.26997.doug@hunley.homeip.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <200707270855.26997.doug@hunley.homeip.net> X-Google-Sender-Auth: 0843426387fe8a43 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On 7/27/07, Douglas J Hunley wrote: > I've been following lkml for a little while (not understanding it all, but > following nonetheless ) and I've noticed that in a lot of the talks about > schedulers, elevators, and performance, the issue of running updatedb and its > effects on the kernel's fs cache seems to recur. I've also yet to see anyone > present a solution that others think is worth pursuing. I'm curious why we're > trying to solve the problem, when we can simply avoid the problem to begin > with by making use of inotify and introducing a new user-space > daemon, 'located'. inotify doesn't scale for lots of directories. I have about 18,000 directories under ~ on my laptop, and that's with a few source trees that I use infrequently tarballed up. But yes, if we had a full filesystem events notifier, then we could just toss updatedb aside and have the benefit of a live index into the system. It's been suggested before, at least by me. Other projects want this as well, such as an on-demand virus scanner, or a live backup to another site, or beagle/tracker who would like to index documents on the fly. beagled already uses inotify, I think, but as it takes over my system (in a bad way) whenever I tried to run it, I had no choice but to remove it. Perhaps it was choking on the 18k subdirectories, dunno. Ray