[Bug 1182517] [NEW] anacron runs updatedb at worst possible time

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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.

** Affects: anacron (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New


** Tags: bot-comment
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anacron runs updatedb at worst possible time
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1182517
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