On Sun, Feb 07, 2021 at 12:40:55AM +0000, Paul Wise wrote: > I support having locate in the base install, but I don't think that > the cost of daily walking the entire filesystem is low; especially > with HDDs and older storage or computers that can be a lot of I/O. I > guess it also alters the Linux kernel block/filesystem caches?
updatedb.plocate, like updatedb.mlocate, doesn't actually watch the entire filesystem. It keeps track of the mtime of each directory, and doesn't do the readdir()/getdents() if it hasn't changed. So you get the cost of stat-ing every directory, but that's actually fairly low. On my server, with ~12M files on rotating media, updatedb.plocate finishes in ~40 seconds, IIRC. (I'd re-check to be sure, but today is RAID Sunday... :-) ) On my laptop with 875k files and a regular SSD, it's less than three. It does alter the filesystem cache somewhat, but the amount of RAM used can be bounded cgroups if desired; it runs from a systemd service. /* Steinar */ -- Homepage: https://www.sesse.net/
