What is an Updatedb process

[achieverzain]

Hi,

Can any one explain me better about why the update db process in the server is increasing the load to a great extent where is the PU resource usage was not found great for that process. Was searching for it for a long time still unable to find something more helpful.

Thanks.

 

[DomineauX]

That would be the daily cron to update the locate database:

/etc/cron.daily/mlocate.cron


From the Man page (command: man updatedb):
---------
DESCRIPTION
updatedb creates or updates a database used by locate(1). If the database already exists, its data is reused to avoid rereading directories that have not changed.
updatedb is usually run daily by cron(8) to update the default database.
---------

 

[Spiral]

DomineauX covered it pretty good but just to expand upon that ....

Updatedb is part of 'mlocate' which is simply an indexing system to keep a database listing all the files on your server that you can do searches from using the 'locate' command at the shell.

It it much faster to use 'locate' than 'find' to locate files because 'locate' uses the index database last built by updatedb while 'find' searches the live file system looking for the files you are searching.

The loads during updatedb running because of it building the database but should have very limited impact to your server other than really negligible and marginally higher load numbers while running. If it is impacting your server more than that then I suspect that you don't have enough memory to really be running Cpanel or your server has far too many accounts loaded on it --- on or the other most likely.

The 'updatedb' is run daily from /etc/cron.daily/mlocate.cron and is controlled by the configuration settings in /etc/updatedb.conf