mlocate - what is it good for?

[jim]

Seems to me for an individual user such
as I (my laptop runs Ubuntu 18.04), locate
and (the cumbersome) find are sufficient.
To what extent does decision-making balance
net ops and large system administrators as
opposed to individual users?


On 5/22/19 3:47 PM, Julian Andres Klode wrote:
> On Wed, May 22, 2019 at 01:19:48PM -0600, Neal McBurnett wrote:
>> I use mlocate multiple times a day.
>> Find is way too slow and inconvenient for finding files in a big
>> set of filesystems, compared to properly configuring mlocate.
> Specifically, the filesystem must be huge or on a slow medium. It might make
> sense to move it out of standard and elsewhere, as I don't think it's
> necessarily needed everywhere, such as laptops.
>
> Consider my laptop, fairly standard, 512 GB NVME SSD, about 250G allocated,
> containing about 1435134 files. mlocate foo takes 1s, find / -mount
> -name '*foo*' takes about 7-9 secs, or 19 seconds with all mount points
> (but there is a davfs mount of an internet server, so things might be
> screwed up a bit).
>
> 19s to find something is perfectly workable, also you don't usually
> find from /, but you have an idea where things are, so it will be much
> faster.
>
> I think mlocate only really makes sense on data storage servers with
> huge disks, or on machines with HDDs. I therefore do not think the
> overhead of building the index is warranted for most users. It might
> make sense to keep mlocate in always-on tasks, like servers, but get
> rid of it from desktop scenarios.

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