Comment 21 for bug 655831

Revision history for this message
Alexander Korsunsky (fat-lobyte9) wrote :

The whole thing is getting ridiculous. The bug is two and a half years old (that makes five (!) releases), there seems to be no benefit to it, so what is the point of keeping this package?

I realise that this job is started with a very low ionice and nice value, and it's *supposed* to not disturb the user because of that. But that plainly doesn't work.
It effectively kills my system for 10-15 minutes.

At least for my system, the real problem is a combination of low ressources:
If memory is low, update-apt-xapian-index starts using swap space (for me, "kswapd0" uses the most I/O ressources when u~-index runs). That combined with actual data being read from the disk and slow hard drive speed effectively makes a system unusable.

Also, the job is run much more often than it should. I already moved the start script from cron.weekly to cron.monthly, but it *still* runs just about every other day.
Also, what is the point of building an index, if Synaptic and software-center have to rebuild the index anyway?

This bug is a serious annoyance for people with weak hardware, and effectively makes the Ubuntu default installation unsuitable for netbooks.