On 7/27/07, Douglas J Hunley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I've been following lkml for a little while (not understanding it all, but > following nonetheless <g>) 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 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
