mlocate - what is it good for?

[Andrea Corbellini]

On Wed, May 22, 2019 at 8:47 PM Julian Andres Klode <
julian.klode at canonical.com> 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.
>

There's also the case of a blazing-fast medium, but high I/O load.
That's the case that I'm often facing when working on production servers.
Using find there is very frustrating.

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.
>

19s for my standards are a lot, especially if I have to do multiple
searches.
There have been cases where I dumped the output of "find /" into a file and
resorted to search using grep.


>
> 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.
> --
> debian developer - deb.li/jak | jak-linux.org - free software dev
> ubuntu core developer                              i speak de, en
>
> --
> ubuntu-devel mailing list
> ubuntu-devel at lists.ubuntu.com
> Modify settings or unsubscribe at:
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-server/attachments/20190522/981fe402/attachment.html>