[Bug 493852] Re: popularity-contest will stat() every file installed file or ~80k files on my system which grinds things to a halt

[Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]

The problem won't go away if you ionice it. It'll just run with ionice
priority, but it'll still being doing an ostensibly completely redundant
stat() of files on the filesystem, instead of just reading from `dpkg
-l`.

So even if that could alleviate the case where it's racing other system
processes for I/O, it won't solve the case of your disk being spun up
for a long time (since it would otherwise be idle) due to popularity
contest.

Why does it need to stat files that packages install in the first place?
Can't it just trust that dpkg(1) reports installed packages correctly?

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/493852

Title:
  popularity-contest will stat() every file installed file or ~80k files
  on my system which grinds things to a halt

Status in “popularity-contest” package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: popularity-contest

  I was trying to use my puny laptop when the popularity-contest cronjob
  started running and killed all I/O performance on my poor ~5000 rpm
  disk. When popularity-contest is run it'll stat() every file installed
  by a package on my system or around 81,000 files on my system which
  has 2252 packages installed.

  I'm willing to send statistics to Ubuntu but I'm not willing to have
  them grind my laptop to a halt. The Ubuntu installer should be more
  specific about what users are getting themselves into and provide the
  option of sending a lite statistics report equivalent to dpkg -l|grep
  ^ii

  ProblemType: Bug
  Architecture: i386
  CheckboxSubmission: 0169f76fbe64c26c287457397cc58891
  CheckboxSystem: bb422ca46d02494cdbc459927a98bc2f
  Date: Tue Dec  8 00:56:20 2009
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
  Package: popularity-contest 1.48ubuntu1
  PackageArchitecture: all
  ProcEnviron:
   LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
   LANG=en_US.UTF-8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-15.50-generic
  SourcePackage: popularity-contest
  Uname: Linux 2.6.31-15-generic i686

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