Process that eats system resources

Sometimes my computer suddenly starts being really slow and when I open Ksysguard theres always a process named updatedb (the parent process of this is called slocate.cron) which eats ALOT of system resources and thus my computers get slow.Its really anoying that my computer suddenly gets slow and that I have to kill the stupid process manually,so can someone tell me what this process actually is and how I can prevent it from starting?
Btw,I am using Red Hat 7.3 with KDE3/GNOME.

updatedb updates the file database for locate. It's usually a cronjob, so if it often starts while you're working, just change the crontab entry so that it will work while you're not working (however, the machine should be still running ).

It's not a really critical thing, unless you (or any program you use) use locate.

See also
man 1 updatedb
man 5 crontab
and references.

HTH

Two options come to mind:

1. Run updatedb in the background
2. Nice its priority

To run it in the background, you'd issue a command like:
/root# updatedb &

To nice it, read the manual entry. I'm at work right now and I don't have the syntax memorized so I don't want to give you incorrect information.

And in this case, the nice call would go into the cron script (slocate.cron, I guess). However, the slower it works, the longer it takes - give updatedb a chance to finish its work (Relax with fortune or something else that needs few ressources.)

B'ah, I just remove off the cron job. In fact, crond is not even started at all! It's better that way.

Do you do all those tasks yourself? My cron by default (SuSE Linux 8.0) deletes temp files, updates the locate database, makes a backup of some config files and rotates log files. I really wouldn't want to do all those tasks manually.

I don't delete temps files, I don't update the locate db, I don't make backup at all and I certainly don't rotate my logs.

It's not a server env so the worst scenario implies that I have to reinstall the whole OS again from scratch. Which is a good thing as it removes the bloat (we learn by trail and error right?) and enforces kwowledge I probably forgot. I also have no boot disk of any kind so if LILO fails, I'm screwed! *I* am bleeding edge, not my distro. hehe.

Ho and about my logs, I simply delete the file after checking if there's nothing interesting (and no, so far nothing) and let syslog start all over. The most excitement I ever had watching my logs (not porn here) is when Nimda was scanning Apache (which happens pretty much twice a day).

Linux is stronger than Windows, I don't see why I should treat it like a little girl, I treat it as a big bad girl (do I sound like I need sex?)!

LOL!
You need sex (but don't we all?)

Fine. You waste disk space, you choose not to use a rather good tool, you don't value your data very highly. Don't forget to post here next time your system breaks and you don't have a backup

My temp dir never exceeds 3-4 MBs, *my* data is difficult (big) to back up so I don't do it but it is still valuable to me and next time my system breaks it will be up and running the same day because Linux is rock-solid!

If there is data on that machine that is not yours, you owe it to the owner of that information to back up the data. Yes, the machine may be back up and running the next day, but all of the data will be gone to NULL. Just because Linux is a stable os, doesn't mean it can't be hacked. In fact I think more vulnerabilities are found in Linux than Windows. Read this - http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/19649.html

The data is all mine but what I meant is that I just don't care whatever happens to my system, i'll just reinstall it if it completely crash and becomes unusable. I never made a back up in all my lifetime! Well actually I partly lied, I do back up but only when I transfer bookmarks but that's mostly it.

I still believe that Linux is much more secure, it's just that it's bugs are openly documented, the same cannot be said for other big closed-source corporations.

Quit frankly, do you have the same data you had 3 to 5 years ago?

Yes, I do. But I've been using computers longer than you've been alive, probably. I have programs I wrote in 1992 still sitting on my hard drive, which I dragged off of floppies (some off of 5 1/4 inch disks).

Personally, I think disabling cron is one of the dumber things I've heard, but you appear to understand the potential consequences of it, so who cares if your systems freak out on you?

I'm at the point where I'm thinking of rsyncing my home directory with a cron job to one of my production web servers, as a way of having the same environment and preferences on all my linux boxes. . . But that's just me. Yes, my data and settings are important to me. Spending a couple hours tweaking your .emacs and .bashrc files will do that to you.

Actually I do. Most of the data that old is source code, but there are some important documents that I have kept as well. Nothing wrong with redundancy, especially with today's low prices for storage media.

At least you understand my point, thanks (not that you're the only one).

The day i'll have a serious machine i'll be serious about it's configuration but for now on it's just a desktop/gaming/word processing/porn/whatever! The only thing I would really like to keep are my PHP pages (which I have in a few tarballs) and my documents.

I never really had a total wasted system. Since I used Slackware I simply wipe out everything (keep certain things) and reinstall a newer version. From there I simply clean the rc.d mess and a few config files and compile a fresh kernel. This whole process doesn't take more than half an hour and I'm ready to go. But now with Gentoo it's all different... everything is already working fine since the begining!!

Once I got a fortune cookie that said: "nohup rm -rf / &". I knew exactly what this was about to do but for some reason I mechanicely (or owever u spel dat) typed and then I noticed my system was quit slow... Luckily it screw nothing, it got into /usr and got stuck in a dir full of mp3s. A few man pages missing, that's the worst I noticed, it ran like that for more than a month. What an ***.