updatedb.mlocate running constantly - never stops

[MountainX]

I am running a fresh install of Jaunty. The updatedb.mlocate process is running all the time. It never stops unless I reboot (which I prefer not to do for months).

I would like to not have updatedb.mlocate running all the time. It could run nightly if it finishes in an hour or less. Otherwise, I will run it weekly (assuming it finishes in a reasonable time).

I have a 150 GB Raptor HDD, and all my main directories under /home are on an NFS mount (see info below). I have several other mounted file systems and they are mounted in different places (to make the path on my machine match the path on the server so symlinks work correctly).

The content of my /etc/updatedb.conf are:

PRUNE_BIND_MOUNTS="yes"
# PRUNENAMES=".git .bzr .hg .svn"
PRUNEPATHS="/tmp /var/spool /media"
PRUNEFS="NFS nfs nfs4 rpc_pipefs afs binfmt_misc proc smbfs autofs iso9660 ncpf$

The contents of my /etc/cron.daily/mlocate are:

#! /bin/bash

set -e

[ -x /usr/bin/updatedb.mlocate ] || exit 0

if which on_ac_power >/dev/null 2>&1; then
    AC_POWER=0
    on_ac_power >/dev/null 2>&1 || AC_POWER=$?
    if [ "$AC_POWER" -eq 1 ]; then
    echo >&2 "On battery power, not running today."
    exit 1
    fi
fi

##

LOCKFILE="/var/lib/mlocate/daily.lock"

trap "rm -f $LOCKFILE" EXIT

if [ -e "$LOCKFILE" ]; then
    echo >&2 "Warning: $LOCKFILE present, not running today."
    exit 1
else
    touch "$LOCKFILE"
fi

##

# See ionice(1)
if [ -x /usr/bin/ionice ] &&
    /usr/bin/ionice -c3 true 2>/dev/null; then
    IONICE="/usr/bin/ionice -c3"
fi

$IONICE /usr/bin/updatedb.mlocate

examples of my mounted file systems are:

/backups
/shared
/home/myuser/Documents
/home/myuser/Pictures
/home/myuser/Music

Here is a typical entry from /etc/fstab:

10.10.1.1:/home/myuser/Documents /home/myuser/Documents nfs auto,rw,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,hard,intr 0 0

This is what iotop usually shows:

Total DISK READ: 0 B/s | Total DISK WRITE: 38.69 K/s
  PID USER      DISK READ  DISK WRITE   SWAPIN    IO<    COMMAND                
27877 root           0 B/s   38.69 K/s  0.00 %  0.00 % updatedb.mlocate

I appreciate any suggestions on how to stop mlocate from running all the time.

[MountainX]

anyone have suggestions? mlocate never stops running!

[DaithiF]

Hi,
Your /etc/updatedb.conf looks like it might be truncated...the PRUNEFS line for me is:

PRUNEFS="NFS nfs nfs4 rpc_pipefs afs binfmt_misc proc smbfs autofs iso9660 ncpfs coda devpts ftpfs devfs mfs shfs sysfs cifs lustre_lite tmpfs usbfs udf"

The inclusion of nfs in that list should cause updatedb to skip your nfs-mounts by the way, which shouldn't leave very much work for updatedb to do, so I would have expected it to finish pretty quickly.

[MountainX]

Hi,
Your /etc/updatedb.conf looks like it might be truncated..

The inclusion of nfs in that list should cause updatedb to skip your nfs-mounts by the way, which shouldn't leave very much work for updatedb to do, so I would have expected it to finish pretty quickly.

Thank you. My /etc/updatedb.conf is correct. The truncation is only the result of the way I copied and pasted. Here is the actual file:

cat /etc/updatedb.conf
PRUNE_BIND_MOUNTS="yes"
# PRUNENAMES=".git .bzr .hg .svn"
PRUNEPATHS="/tmp /var/spool /media"
PRUNEFS="NFS nfs nfs4 rpc_pipefs afs binfmt_misc proc smbfs autofs iso9660 ncpfs coda devpts ftpfs devfs mfs shfs sysfs cifs lustre_lite tmpfs usbfs udf"

I also expected all my nfs-mounts would be skipped on the basis of this config; however, something is wrong somewhere. Do you have any suggested troubleshooting steps?

[DaithiF]

I would suggest running it manually in a terminal , and with the -v option so that you can see what its doing. The -v option should make it output the paths as it is scanning them, so you can maybe see what its doing for such a long time. Pipe the output into tee to save it to a file for inspection later too.

sudo updatedb.mlocate -v | tee updatedb.log

[MountainX]

Is there a safe/proper way to terminate the currently running mlocate process other than to kill it? Is killing it while it is running OK?

EDIT: also, what is the recommended way to remove it from cron? Just delete mlocate from /etc/cron.daily?