On Wed, 2007-07-25 at 15:05 -0700, Paul Jackson wrote:
[snip]
> Question:
>   Could those who have found this prefetch helps them alot say how
>   many disks they have?  In particular, is their swap on the same
>   disk spindle as their root and user files?
> 
> Answer - for me:
>   On my system where updatedb is a big problem, I have one, slow, disk.
>   On my system where updatedb is a small problem, swap is on a separate
>     spindle.
>   On my system where updatedb is -no- problem, I have so much memory
>     I never use swap.
> 
> I'd expect the laptop crowd to mostly have a single, slow, disk, and
> hence to find updatedb more painful.

A well done swap-to-flash would help here.  I sometimes do it anyway to
a 4GB CF card but I can tell it's hitting the read/update/write cycles
on the flash blocks.  The sad thing is that it is still a speed
improvement over swapping to laptop disk.
-- 
Zan Lynx <zlynx@acm.org>