What goes into default Debian?

Posted Mar 23, 2021 20:12 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: What goes into default Debian? by Sesse
Parent article: What goes into default Debian?

Aha! If it's that easy, I might work on some patches. I do like the idea of plocate, but unless it works with a setup that allows N databases, one per NFS export point, it's kinda hard to make it do anything useful on a system where most filesystems you would like to run locate over are on NFS. (In my case, I usually run locate on the desktop and almost all the things I ever want it to find are on the server. Obviously the server's locate databases have to be built *on* the server: even with 10GbE I don't want updatedb throwing the stat data for thirty million files over the network every night :) and that means multiple databases if I want locate on the client to scan everything visible from the client, whether it's server-side or not).

What goes into default Debian?

Posted Mar 28, 2021 10:39 UTC (Sun) by Sesse (subscriber, #53779) [Link] (3 responses)

I pushed code for searching multiple databases to the git repository. Please give it a go.

What goes into default Debian?

Posted Mar 28, 2021 10:52 UTC (Sun) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]

That's why I love open source community!

What goes into default Debian?

Posted Apr 27, 2021 12:54 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Ooh, excellent! I'll give this a try this weekend :) (yes, sometimes I do go months between catching up with LWN. Mea culpa etc.)

What goes into default Debian?

Posted Mar 27, 2022 15:50 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Aaaand months and months after I said I'd try it, I finally did. This thing is fantastic :)

Before, with GNU findutils: 40 mins to build the locatedb, 10 mins if everything was in cache. Afterwards (hot cache figures only): 56 seconds. DBs about five times smaller. As for times:

% /usr/bin/time locate wombat
[...]
8.09user 0.08system 0:08.25elapsed 99%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 2084maxresident)k

% /usr/bin/time locate -r wombat
[...]
19.75user 0.40system 0:20.38elapsed 98%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 2196maxresident)k

% /usr/bin/time locate -r womb.t
[...]
24.98user 0.03system 0:25.08elapsed 99%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 2184maxresident)k

Afterwards:
% /usr/bin/time locate wombat
[...]
0.00user 0.00system 0:00.02elapsed 71%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 4140maxresident)k

% /usr/bin/time locate -r wombat
[...]
4.95user 0.10system 0:01.68elapsed 299%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 10952maxresident)k

% /usr/bin/time locate -r womb.t
[...]
5.15user 0.06system 0:01.72elapsed 302%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 11012maxresident)k

This is with a LOCATE_PATH with 19 databases in it, so I think we can safely say that the 20-fold increases in plocate time implied by this are... well... still pretty insignificant :)