On Monday 23 April 2001 5:11 pm, Colin Watson wrote: > Package: debian-policy > Version: 3.5.3.0 > Severity: wishlist >
[big snip, you already know what it says] Today I got sick of waiting for man to search for some pages, it has been getting steadily slower for weeks now. I suspect my man database had become at least semi-corrupt, I have been running man on lots of local files recently, maybe this has some bearing? A quick scan through the manpage for mandb showed up a -c option to totally recreate the database from scratch. Just running 'mandb -c' has significantly speeded man up for me. semi-proposal (call it wishlist if you like): the current update in cron.weekly of the database seems to only clear out dangling symlinks and warn about bad groff, from what I have observed (although I have no concrete proof of this) recreating the database from scratch offers significant improvement in at least some cases (like when the database becomes slightly corrupt,) and shouldn't do any harm in any case I can think of. clothcat:/etc/cron.weekly# diff -h man-db man-db.proposed 8c8 < /usr/bin/nice /usr/bin/mandb 2>/dev/null >/dev/null --- > /usr/bin/nice /usr/bin/mandb -c 2>/dev/null >/dev/null clothcat:/etc/cron.weekly# or make that a cron.monthly and leave the weekly as is? (this is preferable especially if there is a significant difference in resources used for either method) Just a thought. -- Stephen Stafford GPG public key on request
