On Tue, Jan 22, 2002 at 05:59:30PM -0600, Adam Majer wrote: > On Tue, Jan 22, 2002 at 09:55:56PM +0200, Ian Balchin wrote: > > Hi, all, > > > > Shortly after booting up, machine probably had been off for 24h, > > there is a flurry of activity from the hdd. I imagine this is the > > file system being updated. A look at top, for instance, shows ls > > being run and lots of other stuff too. This is a regular occurrence. > > > > At this time I was downloading the email when this happened (wvdial, > > exim, fetchmail, etc) and the email download came to a grinding halt > > while we had some many minutes of automatic operation tidy-up or > > whatever. We don't get free local calls here, the local monopoly has > > punitive rates designed to make them rich from internet surfers, so > > this is a matter of serious concern. > > If you are running anacron, like I do, since the machine is down [there > is no reason for it to be up], then when you turn on the computer, just > wait for a few minutes or so until it's done updating.. > > That is the easy thing to do... There might be a way of making all processes > started by cron nice - that is make cron or anacron or whatever nice 10 or > nice 19 process. Then all the children should have the same priority..
I have of course been careful to do that of late. I need to investigate this further, so just want to ask what you mean by the term 'children' ? I assume that you mean the processes spawned by anacron, can you please confirm. I do have anacron in init.d so suppose that this is operational. My knowledge is sketchy, looks like anacron somehow makes the cron things go daily/weekly/monthly as necessary soon after bootup as cron is meant for machines that are on continually. I get about 3 days max before a power blip switches it off so until I get another UPS I tend to switch it off. Thanks for your post. Ian -- Ian Balchin http://www.imaginet.co.za/fables This machine is running Debian GNU/Linux ... http://www.debian.org
