Cc: Daniel Hazelton <dhazelton@...>, Mike Galbraith <efault@...>, Andrew Morton <akpm@...>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@...>, Frank Kingswood <frank@...>, Andi Kleen <andi@...>, Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@...>, Ray Lee <ray-lk@...>, Jesper Juhl <jesper.juhl@...>, ck list <ck@...>, Paul Jackson <pj@...>, <linux-mm@...>, <linux-kernel@...>
Yes. GNU locate is broken and nobody should be using it. The updatedb from
(my distribution standard) "slocate" uses around 2M allocated total during
an entire run while GNU locate allocates some 30M to the sort process alone.
GNU locate is also close to 4 times as slow (although that ofcourse only
matters on cached runs anyways).
So, GNU locate is just a pig pushing things out, with or without any added
VFS cache pressure from the things it does by design. As such, we can trust
people complaining about it but should first tell them to switch to halfway
sane locate implementation. If you run memory hogs on small memory boxes,
you're going to suffer.
Leaves the fact that swap-prefetch sometimes helps alleviate these and other
kinds of memory-hog situations and as such, might not (again) be a bad idea
in itself.
Rene.
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