Re: cron job?

[Roger R Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

Date: Sat, 27 Nov 1999 14:43:24 -0500 (EST)
From: Donovan Rebbechi <elflord@panix.com>
To: independence-l@independence.seul.org
Subject: Re: cron job?

> Twice now (in as many months), something has started and run on my
> system when I was in the middle of something important and caused me to
> loose much work. I think it is a system related job. Like a cron file
> cleaning job or something. 

Sounds like makewhatis ( updates the whatis database ). Since you have(?)
a single user machine, you can probably remove the cron job and just run
"whatis" manually every now and then. Makewhatis seems to be the heaviest
cron job.

There's also a cleanup job, tmpwatch. This could use a lot of resources if
you have a lot of files in /tmp/ . Personally, my money is on makewhatis
though.

An alternative would be to "nice" the job, and also to use a ulimit
command to limit the amount of physical memory that the job can use. Maybe
we could fix this.

To find the file in question ...

ls /etc/cron*/makewhatis*

> constant activity and it uses so much of the system's resources that X
> Window applications become unresponsive. Typing or moving the cursor

The idea is that this job isn't supposed to run when you are using the
computer.

Cheers,
-- 
Donovan