[Bug 493852] Re: popularity-contest will stat() every file installed file or ~80k files on my system which grinds things to a halt

[Andrey Bondarenko]

As of version 1.52ubuntu2 popularity-contest started as a regular
process. I suppose changing IO and CPU scheduling priorities Idle should
place less load to the system, but I cannot notice the change in my
environment. Both cases works on my P4-3GHz 3GiB or RAM with two 7200
RPM disks equally well.

Anyway, I agree that system with less RAM or slower disk may suffer from
popcon activity. But we have to test things to decide if nice/ionice is
enough or we should limit IO with some other means. Please try to do
some job while popularity contest is running to check how much it slows
down your system.

The following test should simulate current situation:

sudo sh -c "echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches; sync"
time popularity-contest

The next test should run popularity-contest as a low-priority background
task

sudo sh -c "echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches; sync"
time ionice -c 3 nice popularity-contest


In case, changing priority is enough, patch it really trivial:

=== modified file 'debian/cron.daily'
--- debian/cron.daily   2011-05-23 15:38:47 +0000
+++ debian/cron.daily   2011-06-10 15:35:17 +0000
@@ -50,7 +50,7 @@
 
 run_popcon()
 {
-       su -s /bin/sh -c "/usr/sbin/popularity-contest" nobody
+       su -s /bin/sh -c "/usr/bin/ionice -c 3 /usr/bin/nice /usr/sbin/popularity-contest" nobody
 }
 
 do_sendmail()

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/493852

Title:
  popularity-contest will stat() every file installed file or ~80k files
  on my system which grinds things to a halt

Status in “popularity-contest” package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: popularity-contest

  I was trying to use my puny laptop when the popularity-contest cronjob
  started running and killed all I/O performance on my poor ~5000 rpm
  disk. When popularity-contest is run it'll stat() every file installed
  by a package on my system or around 81,000 files on my system which
  has 2252 packages installed.

  I'm willing to send statistics to Ubuntu but I'm not willing to have
  them grind my laptop to a halt. The Ubuntu installer should be more
  specific about what users are getting themselves into and provide the
  option of sending a lite statistics report equivalent to dpkg -l|grep
  ^ii

  ProblemType: Bug
  Architecture: i386
  CheckboxSubmission: 0169f76fbe64c26c287457397cc58891
  CheckboxSystem: bb422ca46d02494cdbc459927a98bc2f
  Date: Tue Dec  8 00:56:20 2009
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
  Package: popularity-contest 1.48ubuntu1
  PackageArchitecture: all
  ProcEnviron:
   LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
   LANG=en_US.UTF-8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-15.50-generic
  SourcePackage: popularity-contest
  Uname: Linux 2.6.31-15-generic i686

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