On Wed, 2007-07-25 at 15:05 -0700, Paul Jackson wrote:
[snip]

Question:
  Could those who have found this prefetch helps them alot say how
  many disks they have?  In particular, is their swap on the same
  disk spindle as their root and user files?

Answer - for me:
  On my system where updatedb is a big problem, I have one, slow, disk.
  On my system where updatedb is a small problem, swap is on a separate
    spindle.
  On my system where updatedb is -no- problem, I have so much memory
    I never use swap.

I'd expect the laptop crowd to mostly have a single, slow, disk, and
hence to find updatedb more painful.

A well done swap-to-flash would help here.  I sometimes do it anyway to
a 4GB CF card but I can tell it's hitting the read/update/write cycles
on the flash blocks.  The sad thing is that it is still a speed
improvement over swapping to laptop disk.
-- 
Zan Lynx [off-list ref]