Re: solving(?) the updatedb problem w/ the kernel cache

[Michael Tharp <gxti@partiallystapled.com>]

Ray Lee wrote:
> But yes, if we had a full filesystem events notifier, then we could
> just toss updatedb aside and have the benefit of a live index into the
> system. It's been suggested before, at least by me. Other projects
> want this as well, such as an on-demand virus scanner, or a live
> backup to another site, or beagle/tracker who would like to index
> documents on the fly. beagled already uses inotify, I think, but as it
> takes over my system (in a bad way) whenever I tried to run it, I had
> no choice but to remove it.

Beagle's problem is that it inspects the file contents, often far too
closely. I, too, had to uninstall it after it started indexing 40GB raw
huffyuv video files (probably treating them as text) and driving load
averages through the roof. Just watching for structure changes won't be
nearly as painful, assuming inotify can handle watching the entire
filesystem tree.


-- m. tharp