CentOS - Aug 2012 - updatedb taking too long

Hi list

 For some reason mlocate is taking a long time when I run the updatedb
command. Have a look!

[root at beta:~] #time updatedb
real    19m48.729s
user    0m0.400s
sys     0m2.728s

It's not a big volume by any means

[root at beta:~] #df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda1             75G  9.1G   63G  13% /

So I'm wondering what could be causing this command to take so long.


I'm running centos 5.8 in a xen vm.

I was hoping I could get some advice that would help me troubleshoot this
problem.

Thanks!
Tim

-- 
GPG me!!

gpg --keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net --recv-keys F186197B

On 08/28/2012 05:47 PM, Tim Dunphy wrote:
>   For some reason mlocate is taking a long time when I run the updatedb
> command. Have a look!
>
> [root at beta:~] #time updatedb
> real    19m48.729s
> user    0m0.400s
> sys     0m2.728s
Does

# time /etc/cron.daily/mlocate.cron

take the same amount of time? It calls updatedb with
a list of file systems to be skipped.

When updatedb is running, get the PID of the process, and
try to follow the files the process has opened by:

# ls -l /proc/PID/fd

Do this now and then when updatedb runs this might
give you an idea where in the file system it spends
most of the time.

Mogens

-- 
Mogens Kjaer, mk at lemo.dk
http://www.lemo.dk