Re: Adding makemandb as build tool for man.db

On Tue, Oct 09, 2018 at 09:46:48AM +0100, David Brownlee wrote:
> On lower powered (and particularly lower memory boxes), the makemandb
> on first boot after install can run for some time and significantly
> affect the performance of the system (in extreme cases for several
> hours).

It is not so much memory, but slow disk access that makes it painfull.
Most sparc machines do pretty well, mac68k is a disaster.

Even if you distribute the database, it will take some serious time on
each boot to check it is up to date.

Maybe we should add an rc.conf option to delay it after boot (i.e. sleep
three hours and only then start the man page check), defaulting to 0 (i.e.
no delay) on most architectures but make sysinst configure it to a few
hours on slow architectures.

We should also offer usefull (and documented) slow-systems ssh{d}
default configurations, even if they are "unsafe" from a modern world's
PoV.

Martin