2003-07-18 12:11:40

by joe briggs

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: run-parts,find, kupdated: What are they and how to control them?

Please - can someone explain what happens here once a day when my machine
becomes completely unusable, a tremendous amount of disk i/o begins to occur,
and 'top' shows "run-parts" and "find" at > 80% cpu utilization. What are
they doing? Are they necessary? Can they be controlled. In Googling for
these answers first, all I see are compaints, but no answers. Can someone
PLEASE either explain what these are doing and how they are controlled, or
point me in the right direction? Many thanks.

--
Joe Briggs
Briggs Media Systems
105 Burnsen Ave.
Manchester NH 01304 USA
TEL 603-232-3115 FAX 603-625-5809 MOBILE 603-493-2386
http://www.briggsmedia.com


2003-07-18 12:44:05

by Olaf Dietsche

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Subject: Re: run-parts,find, kupdated: What are they and how to control them?

joe briggs <[email protected]> writes:

> Please - can someone explain what happens here once a day when my machine
> becomes completely unusable, a tremendous amount of disk i/o begins to occur,
> and 'top' shows "run-parts" and "find" at > 80% cpu utilization. What are
> they doing? Are they necessary? Can they be controlled. In Googling for
> these answers first, all I see are compaints, but no answers. Can someone
> PLEASE either explain what these are doing and how they are controlled, or
> point me in the right direction? Many thanks.

This has nothing to do with the kernel. I guess, it's a cron job. Do a

$ grep find /etc/crontab /etc/cron*/*

and look wether one of the entries corresponds with the time when your
machine becomes unusable.

Regards, Olaf.

2003-07-18 15:06:46

by DervishD

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: run-parts,find, kupdated: What are they and how to control them?

Hi Joe :)

* joe briggs <[email protected]> dixit:
> Can someone
> PLEASE either explain what these are doing and how they are controlled, or
> point me in the right direction? Many thanks.

Your problem has nothing to do with the kernel itself. Your
problem is that you have cron jobs that eat resources. If you don't
want them, just disable cron, or delete the cron jobs, etc...

Without knowing your distro, your cron config or more details for
you system I cannot tell you more. Just in case, find is a binary
for... finding files; run-parts is for running things in your
/etc/rc* directories and kupdated is the buffer cache manager (well,
more or less...). BTW, googling for 'kupdated' shows a lot of info...

I don't know of a mailing list related to this kind of questions,
so I think this can be as good as any. If you want more help you will
have to give me more information about your problem.

Ra?l N??ez de Arenas Coronado

--
Linux Registered User 88736
http://www.pleyades.net & http://raul.pleyades.net/

2003-07-18 18:48:05

by Brian Jackson

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Subject: Re: run-parts,find, kupdated: What are they and how to control them?

Look for updatedb in your cron jobs. That's usually what causes a bunch of
find activity for me. You can either diable them or setup /etc/updatedb.conf
to prune some fs's/path's that don't need to be slocate'd. HTH

--Brian Jackson

On Friday 18 July 2003 08:25 am, joe briggs wrote:
> Please - can someone explain what happens here once a day when my machine
> becomes completely unusable, a tremendous amount of disk i/o begins to
> occur, and 'top' shows "run-parts" and "find" at > 80% cpu utilization.
> What are they doing? Are they necessary? Can they be controlled. In
> Googling for these answers first, all I see are compaints, but no answers.
> Can someone PLEASE either explain what these are doing and how they are
> controlled, or point me in the right direction? Many thanks.

--
OpenGFS -- http://opengfs.sourceforge.net
Home -- http://www.brianandsara.net