Re: Running makemandb on every boot

On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 12:31:21AM +0100, David Brownlee wrote:
> Given that makemandb is run nightly and weekly by cron anyway, it would
> probably be best for those systems to not have makemandb run on boot.

Sounds like a good idea - however, doesn't work well for notebooks that
you do not have running over night.

> My first thought would be to allow setting it in sysinst, with a per port -
> default on for i386, amd64, modern (arm, powerpc, mips), off for others.

I don't like that - a generals solution is better.

FWIW: my (very fast) vax says:
       49.30 real        32.61 user        14.36 sys

my shark (slow arm, very slow disk) says:
       39.78 real        16.13 user        18.94 sys

the mac68k was similar when I last tested.

However, it goes realy bad if there is not enough ram - so maybe we could use
something like this as a generic condition:

if [ $(sysctl hw.physmem64) -lt 25165824 ]; ...

to run it at boot time?

Also we could delay it with a "sleep 120" to have other parts of the
startup finish first)?

Martin