From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020815 Description of problem: The rhn-applet work just fine, but it make too many querys to the rpm database in the local system. Servers with high load would like the rhn-applet to query the rpm and rhn server every 30minutes or more. It would be nice if rhn-applet has a configuracion parameter or command line option to set the interval in which it should query the local rpm database and the rhn servers. In my case, I would like the rhn-applet to check for updates every 8hours. Filled as enhancement request Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): rhn-applet-1.0.6-11 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. run rhn-applet 2. wait 30 seconds or more 3. run red-carpet or another application that keep the rpm db open 4. in the console from where you launched rhn-applet, you see this message every 10 seconds: error: cannot get shared lock on /var/lib/rpm/Packages
this is simply a debug message and not a real error. it can safely be ignored. it doesn't query the DB every 10 seconds; it checks to see if the mtime of /var/lib/rpm/Packages as changed every 10 seconds. if it has changed since the last successful read, it tries to read the db. if it hasn't changed, though, it doesn't re-read the db. so the only thing that happens every 10 seconds is an mtime check, which is very inexpensive.
The problem occurs when you left the rpm DB open in another aplication, for example up2date or Ximian's red-carpet. These problem left the rpm db open while downloading the updates or even when they are just run. So, the DB can stay open like 10hours(1 night) and the rhn-applet will try to open the rpm db every 10 seconds. I think the "cannot get shared lock" message is coming from the db3 library, so doing this every 10 seconds is more expensive than just checking the mtime.