It is *not* about updatedb. That is just a trivial case which people
notice. Therefore fixing updatedb to be nicer, as was discussed at
various points in this thread, is *not* the solution.
Most users are also *not*at*all* interested in kernel builds as a metric
of system performance.
When I'm at work, I run a large, commercial, engineering application.
While running, it takes most of the system memory (4GB and up), and it
reads and writes very large files. Swap prefetch noticeably helps my
desktop too. Can I measure it? Not sure. Can people on lkml fix the
application? Certainly not.
Frank
-