On April 11, 2004, at 00:52, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote: > > On Sat, 2004-04-10 at 13:03, Simon Perreault wrote: > > Ok, I found out what the problem was. The culprit is not prelink. It is > > slocate. <snip> > Tools like "slocate" are pathological in their behaviour for caches. > The cache is meant to help when you need to access the same data again > and again, which is very common. However, slocate reads every single > file in a filesystem once, so the caches balloon up in size with data > that they don't need to contain. <snip again> We have a similar problem with databases: reports that need to scan an entire database fill the database cache with unnecessary data, while only a fraction of the database is usually active. In the database package I am familiar with, you can set a parameter that limits how much database cache the reports are allowed to use. It seems like a similar parameter for file system cache could be created for programs like slocate. Fred
