Hallo, * Colin Watson [Wed, Oct 31 2018, 11:38:31AM]: > On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 10:27:22PM +0100, Eduard Bloch wrote: > > I am no longer able to install many packages. The man-db hook keeps > > running and running for ages. > > > > I have monitored it with strace and it seems to run over the same files > > in man1 folder all over again, never ending. See the logs (also > > filtered for open* syscalls): > > > > https://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~bloch/misc/wtf_mandb_dead_loop.txt.gz > > https://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~bloch/misc/wtf_mandb_dead_loop.strace.log > > Are you sure it's looping endlessly? Your logs don't support that > theory. Some file names are repeated, but that's because they're the > basenames of manual pages that exist in a number of different languages. > I haven't so far seen any page being processed more than once in your > log. (Note that each file is opened twice in relatively quick > succession for different phases of processing, which is a little bit > suboptimal but not evidence of an endless loop.) > > I think what's happening is simply that man-db was rebuilt against a new > version of gdbm and therefore has to rebuild its database from scratch, > and that this is unfortunately rather slow. I'd need more evidence to > determine that there's an endless-loop-type bug here.
No, not sure. But it was running for minutes and didn't seem to finish. The system was not under load, FS is running on SSD, plenty of RAM available too. Today, after reboot, it works again like nothing happened. So, assuming you are right, it looks like a sudden performance degradation but without any obvious reason and not reproducible anymore. Maybe I should have waited a few minutes more. So I guess we should close the BR then? Best regards, Eduard.
