ELF Binary Stripper?

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, Chris Stark wrote:

> On Wed, 2005-10-12 at 11:24 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote:
> [ snip -- well-written tirade :) ]
>
>> Since there is at least one person who posted a question on this
>> topic, I suppose there are others out there like me who are
>> annoyed and worried by this tool.
>
> My workstation in the office is a 1GHz PIII with 1.25GB RAM running FC4.
> It's not a super fast system, but it works for web programming.
>
> It seems like every day when I'm working, prelink inevitably launches
                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> when I'm doing something important and pegs my processor at 100% for
> often-times over two to three hours. Like Mike said, there's not really
> anything anywhere stating why I should just sit back and let my
> productivity be cut in half for a portion of every day while my system
> struggles to do ANYTHING other than prelink.

Notwithstanding the later discussion about the value or lack of value of 
prelink, one might ask why it is interrupting you.  Tasks in 
/etc/cron.daily are cheduled to kick off at 4:02 am.

If your machine is off at night, then the daily cron job won't run.  In 
that case, anacron kicks off cron.daily tasks 65 minutes after booting up.

So if you don't want to endure the load of daily maintenance tasks, leave 
your machine on.  If you don't want to do that, you can adjust the start 
time of cron in /etc/crontab and the delay for anacron in /etc/anacron.

>
> If the benefits and rationale for using prelink are documented anywhere,
> I sincerely would be interested in viewing this. Otherwise, the claim of
> it significantly speeding anything up is made moot by the fact that the
> system is virtually unusable when prelink is running.

Also, is everyone in on this discussion sure that it is prelink that is 
providing the load?  slocate.cron can run for a long time on large 
filesystems.  I've seen occasional problems with logrotate where buggy 
specs in /etc/logrotate.d cause runaway creation of rotated logs.  When 
this happens, you'll spot it if you "ls -R /var/log".

I ran into one of these a while back (before Fedora, IIRC), and by the 
time I figured out the problem, logrotate was starting at 4am and running 
until 11am trying to rotate several thousand empty or almost empty log 
files.  The load was up and the disk drive was hammered the entire time.

>
> I don't want this to turn into my own little tirade or a flamewar, but I
> do think Mike is justified in his claim that the software is of
> questionable value, especially if there is little information available
> other than firsthand experience of it behaving undesirably.

Reading mailing lists is bound to result in your seeing much of the 
firsthand experience of undesirable behavior.  Most people who are running 
without problems don't post to mailing lists about it.

>
> Aloha,
>

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs