The computer on which I run innd is used for many other things, including as my desktop PC. When it restarts uncleanly (which has been happening often recently, since Rawhide keeps pushing out new kernels which hang my computer) and makehistory runs on reboot, it hoses the system to such a large extent that I can't get any other work done until it's done. Perhaps this is because I have bad disks or because I'm using IDE instead of the better-performing SATA or SCSI, but in any case, I came up with a very simple idea for solving the problem which I thought might be useful to others as well, so I'm submitting it as a patch for consideration. I added a "-L" argument to makehistory to specify a load average limit. If the system load average exceeds the specified limit, makehistory sleeps until it goes below the limit. With this change in place, I simply modified /etc/rc.news to add "-L 2" to the makehistory invocation, and presto, my machine is perfectly useable while makehistory is running. Please see attached patch.
Created attachment 186101 [details] patch to add -L load-average to makehistory
Changing version to '9' as part of upcoming Fedora 9 GA. More information and reason for this action is here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping
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Sorry for so long without (non-automatic) response, it got lost somehow in my list of bugs... Thanks for suggestion and patch. I reported this and proposed a bit modified patch on inn-patches (further redirected to inn-workers). See https://lists.isc.org/pipermail/inn-workers/2009-June/016788.html for details if you want. Russ Albery's reply "I'm not sure that I understand why this is a reasonable solution. makehistory is a maintenance program that isn't ever run automatically. If the administrator, while running it manually, would like it not to dominate the system, isn't that what the nice command is for?" seems to be correct for me Usage of makehistory is not enabled by default in /etc/rc.news file - just in comment as example. As upstream seems to be not interested in this change, closing that bugzilla WONTFIX. Modification of that comment was proposed (to use nice with lower priority by default) was proposed.
Well, it seems I misunderstood upstream list communication, now it looks like they accepted it in http://inn.eyrie.org/trac/changeset/8534/trunk . So removing WONTFIX, will add it in rawhide soon.
Added and built as inn-2.5.0-2.fc12 , closing RAWHIDE.