Is it possible to make Fedora load faster?

[Dan Williams]

On Mon, 4 Apr 2005, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 04:42 -0400, Alan Cox wrote:
> > On Sun, Apr 03, 2005 at 09:05:37PM -0400, Richard Hally wrote:
> > > are you saying that Fedora is unsuitable for ordinary desktops and (by 
> > > extension laptops) unless they have scsi?
> > 
> > I think some people would prefer to say that "PC's are unsuitable for use
> > without real disks" 8)
> > 
> > In this case the fact that it is I/O not CPU means the requirements to quieten
> > such an app are really not handled by nice(2)
> 
> also note that the cfq io scheduler makes updatedb and friends a lot
> more bareable. CFQ is default in our kernel, but not in kernel.org
> kernels, so if the "2.6 is bad with updatedb" notion is based on
> kernel.org kernels then I strongly suggest switching those to CFQ.

Even with Red Hat kernels, this really sucks:

1) Get in to work
2) boot laptop
3) run yum update
4) updatedb starts during rpm transaction
5) Wait until updatedb finishes before rpm transaction can continue

Step 5 takes a really really long time.  Obviously, both are hitting the disk 
quite a bit.  Is there any way to detect how much disk activity has gone on in 
the last 5 minutes, for example, and not start updatedb until its settled down?  
It seems that cron could benefit from additional constraints on starting jobs, 
for example postponing a job until cpu and/or disk activity reaches a certain 
level, whether on battery or not, etc.  Would these be useful modifications?

Dan