Re: [Nautilus-list] Medusa

[Simos Xenitellis <simos pc96 ma rhbnc ac uk>]

On Fri, 30 Mar 2001, Ben Ford wrote:

> Rebecca Schulman wrote:
>
> > Darin Adler wrote:
> >
> >> on 3/30/01 11:37 AM, Ben Ford at ben kalifornia com wrote:
> >>
> >>> What makes medusa better than slocate?  Updatedb doesn't kill my box the
> >>> way medusa does.
> >>
> >> Updatedb makes a list of file names. Medusa's indexing daemon indexes all
> >> directory information, including things like modification dates as well as
> >> file names, and also strings found inside text files.
> >>
> >>> Is there a way to configure medusa to only index when I want it to?
> >>>
> >
> > Medusa currently creates an index each night as a cron job.  Cron allows you to
> > let jobs run daily, weekly, or monthly,
> > by moving the cron job in /etc/cron.daily to the appropriate directory.  If you
> > only want medusa to create an index when you
> > specifically ask, you can turn medusa off, and use the request index feature in
> > nautilus, or run "medusa-indexd" by hand when you want to create a new index.
> >
> >
>
> My apologies, I should have looked at cron.  I see medusa-indexd running
> every time I look, so I just assumed that it ran as a background daemon
> and indexed when load was low.  If it is only supposed to run once a day
> then, can we consider the fact that it doesn't stop running a bug?  I
> see you are aware of this by the fact that cron kills the process before
> it runs it.
>
> Could I ask why this behaviour and why it kills this box so bad?  This
> was blindingly fast before I installed Nautilus and Medusa.

It could be different things.
An easy way to understand what medusa is doing at the moment it is
running, is to use the "strace" command.
Find the PID of the medussa instance (ps -aux | grep medusa)
and run "strace -p <PID>". It will show you in real-time what's going
on. Normally, medusa will be opening and closing files one after the
other.
To help reporting, use the -o option as in
	"strace -o output.txt -p <PID>". Once you are happy that
the command has recorded enough activity, Ctrl-C it and publish the
output.txt.

simos