Bug 186540

Summary: request: could mlocate be updated to use inotify?
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: James Hunt <jamesodhunt>
Component: mlocateAssignee: Miloslav Trmač <mitr>
Status: CLOSED CANTFIX QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 5Keywords: FutureFeature
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OS: Linux   
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Enhancement
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Last Closed: 2006-03-24 14:02:21 UTC Type: ---
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Description James Hunt 2006-03-24 08:26:01 UTC 
Description of problem:

Could mlocate be updated to use inotify to remove the need for even running
updatedb?


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Comment 1 Miloslav Trmač 2006-03-24 14:02:21 UTC 
Thanks for the suggestion, but inotify isn't really suitable for such global
watching.

First, inotify doesn't work over network filesystems, so it isn't possible to
guarantee instantaneous update in general, and a periodic scan is necessary
anyway.

Second, inodes of all watched directories have to be kept in memory; on my
laptop that would be roughly 16000 inodes, which is about 10 MB of memory
wasted for locate; consider a file server with a few terabytes of storage.
(To prevent this pinning of kernel memory, inotify has a configurable limit
on the number of watches, which is 8192 by default.)