How to disable rebuilding Xapian index?

[Julita]

Hello! My PC everyday hangs terribly, and the command "top" in terminal shows that the process "update-apt-xapi" is loading my RAM and CPU on 100%. Running "sudo update-apt-xapian-index" shows the percentage of completion of rebuilding Xapian Index, and those minutes are rather ... disturbing, especially when I am typing my BA paper Google did not help much...Since there is no such package, i can not remove it. Please, can somebody tell me what should I do? I have not experienced it in the previous *buntu versions, only in Intrepid...

[compat]

the process is update-apt-xapian-index and in low resource systems it will eat all available ram and then start swapping, leaving the system almost in a freeze state.

do a

sudo apt-get autoremove --purge apt-xapian-index
sudo apt-get autoremove --purge 

this will remove apt-xapian-index and then python-debian and python-xapian

i don't know if it has secondary effects, but it will avoid this anoying process (in low resource systems) to start again

[Julita]

compat, thank you very much!!!!! When I am at home, I'll do it and find out about side effects!

[Sonsum]

I did this on my old laptop running 8.10, no negative results so far...

Thanks for saving me tons of resources!

[compat]

hello, i've seen that it is installed when installing other apps, at least in jaunty, i ended renaming the process,
moved update-apt-xapian-index process to update-apt-xapian-index.disabled in /usr/sbin/ folder

[fcormier]

Here is what I did to disable it:

sudo chmod 644 /etc/cron.weekly/apt-xapian-index

It makes the file not executable.

[Tanker Bob]

Purging apt-xapian-index caused the quick search feature in Synaptic to become inoperative in Jaunty. Changing the weekly script to non-executable proved the better approach with no side effect so far.

[likemindead]

My old PIII laptop thanks you for this!

^____^

[Eiríkr]

I was bitten by this bug as well, and after some digging around, I found the thread on Launchpad discussing the official fix that will be incorporated into Ubuntu at some point. Read this post I wrote in another thread for an explanation of how to implement the official fix in your system now, and a breakdown of what it does.

Cheers,

--Eiríkr

[cdubet]

hello if you do not wish to disable it but to make it consume less cpu, you should do like me:
edit /etc/cron.weekly/apt-xapian-index (for example with vi or gedit)
replace the line
nice $IONICE -c3 $CMD --quiet
by
nice -n 19 $IONICE -c3 $CMD --update --quiet

what it does:
a) run it with the lowest system priority
b) update the db and not built it again -> faster