[Bug 1182517] Re: anacron runs updatedb at worst possible time

[Morten Furbo]

Related to
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mlocate/+bug/1190696 which
makes updatedb.mlocate consume all hdd io.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1182517

Title:
  anacron runs updatedb at worst possible time

Status in “anacron” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Ever morning I wake up and start working around 7:30-8:00am.  Every
  morning I start with a computer that's painfully slow, with disk
  activity taking forever and programs glitching all over the place.
  Every morning my disk is grinding hard for an hour.

  I tracked it down to the fact that anacron is running cron.daily/ at
  7:30 in the morning.  This contains things like updatedb, mlocate,
  apt, mandb, logrotate, and other operations that impose significant
  load on the system.  The *actual* crontab attempts to run these at
  2:25 in the morning, which to the best of my recollection has been
  roughly the same time for the last 15 years.  It was chosen because
  that's when people *aren't* using the machine for actual work.

  Please explain to me why it was decided that running processes that
  take a long time (hours possibly) and impose a radically high system
  load were supposed to be run at the exact same time most people
  actually start using their computers in the morning???

  I consider the choice of 7:30 to be a fairly severe bug (albeit
  trivially fixed), as it prevents every system with anacron installed
  from actually behaving properly.

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