On 7/25/07, Matthew Hawkins [off-list ref] wrote:

On 7/26/07, Ray Lee [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

I'd just like updatedb to amortize its work better. If we had some way
to track all filesystem events, updatedb could keep a live and
accurate index on the filesystem. And this isn't just updatedb that
wants that, beagle and tracker et al also want to know filesystem
events so that they can index the documents themselves as well as the
metadata. And if they do it live, that spreads the cost out, including
the VM pressure.

We already have this, its called inotify (and if I'm not mistaken,
beagle already uses it).  Several years ago when it was still a little
flakey patch, I built a custom filesystem indexer into an enterprise
search engine using it (I needed to pull apart Unix mbox files).  The
only trouble of course is the action is triggered immediately, which
may not always be ideal (but that's a userspace problem)

With all this discussion about updatedb and locate and such, I thought
I'd do a Google search, (considering I've never heard of locate before
but I've seen updatedb here and there in ps lists) and I found this:

http://www.linux.com/articles/114029

That page mentions something called "rlocate", which seems to provide
some sort of almost-real-time mechanism, although the method it does
so bothers me -- it uses a 2.6 kernel module AND a userspace daemon.
And from what I can tell, there's no indication that this almost
"real-time" (--I see mentions of a 2 second lag--) system
replaces/eliminates updatedb in any way, shape, or form.

http://rlocate.sourceforge.net/ - Project "Web Site"
http://sourceforge.net/projects/rlocate/ - Source Forge Project Summary

The last release also appears a bit dated on sourceforge... release
0.4.0 on 2006-01-15.

Just thought I'd mention it.


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