suggestion- don't default prelink,makewhatis to run

[marko]

I just installed fedora core 3, I'd like to suggest for future Fedora's that they consider not defaulting the cron system to run these:
makewhatis, slocate, prelink.
These seem to be real resource hogs, and more annoying, they seem to fire off right after you install Fedora. So right when you're trying to get your system setup, prelink comes along and takes 99% of the cpu. Could these at least be run at a nice level to be less hoggy? I don't know if many people do what I do but the first thing I do when I install Fedora is go in the cron.* directories and disable all those from running.

Marko

[crackers]

You'll need to file a bug or enhancement at bugzilla.redhat.com - posting here won't get any attention from the developers.

As for disabling those by default, it's not likely gonna happen. As you've found, they're set up to be run by cron, at a (local) time when the computer is not likely to be used by a "regular" user. Since cron was just initialized, it'll fire up and try to complete un-executed tasks. What you've effectively done is now completely disable one of the security/protection mechanisms (prelink) - and one of the more powerful "man" commands (apropos).

[Jman]

Are you sure they aren't nice already? Did you notice any slowdown? If there is idle CPU time might as well use it.

Look on the bright side, you could be like me and keep such crazy hours as to actually be online when said cron jobs run...

[crackers]

Originally Posted by Jman

Look on the bright side, you could be like me and keep such crazy hours as to actually be online when said cron jobs run...

I know it's time to be in bed when my 3 AM backup job starts running...

[Dog-One]

I usually leave the cron stuff intact, but I really dislike the anacron feature, so I do disable that. To me it's kind of like missing Monday Night Football--once it's over, it's over. Those missed jobs can wait until the next night to get run IMHO.

[adam]

Could you please simply explain to me what is prelink for? I'm afraid I don't understand a lot from its man page. I switched it to run monthly not daily, hope I won't miss anything important, or would I?

[crackers]

Probably not - what it does (I think) is pre-allocates memory slots for shared dynamic libraries. This speeds up program loading by a very large amount, since the memory allotment is calculated ahead of time instead of while a library is being loaded.