'updatedb' : is it really mandatory, can I switch it off and how ?!

[Duncan Anderson]

Trouilliez Vincent wrote:

> Hi boys,
>
> I am trying to make my PC silent, which includes sorting out my hard 
> drive.
> I am extremely annoyed at the constant activity it shows. Even when 
> the system is idle and I have been doing nothing but reading some man 
> page, the system keeps accessing my hard drive all the time, a little 
> 'squirt' every few seconds. I gave up trying to find out wha twas 
> causing this and ended up hiding the problem by using 'hdparm' to 
> adjust the 'acoustic management ' feature of the drive. Basically just 
> a 'hdparm -M 128 /dev/hda'.
> However every now and then, it suffers from the "windows" syndrome.   
> That is, system is idle, and all of a sudden it will start accessing 
> the drive in an extremely n,oisy manner, for at least 10 consecutive 
> seconds that then feel like eternity.  It was so so long that even got 
> the time to start a terminal and run the 'top' command whislt it was 
> torturing my drive.  The process that came up was apparently something 
> called 'updatedb'.
>
> What is this thing, and how can I proceed to stop it from torturing 
> uselessly both my drive, and my ears ?
>
> Vince, needs silence to concentrate on his work and enjoy his Ubuntu 
> fully... :o)
>
"updatedb" keeps the "locate" database up to date. If you wish to use 
the "locate" command to find a file, then "updatedb" needs to run 
periodically. Since I am still waiting for my Ubuntu CD I can't tell you 
where it is set up.

On any UNIX or Linux system, you can expect a small hard disk access at 
regular intervals, usually every 30 seconds(but this may vary). It is a 
process called "syncing" and it is necessary for keeping the 
superblock/freelist updated on each file system. Don't worry. It is 
completely normal.

"updatedb" on the other hand can be disabled. Check out your crontabs, 
maybe it is set up as a cron job.

regards
Duncan