Issue
I'm running linux mint 17 and I notice that every so often my computer slows to a crawl.W When I look at top I see "/usr/bin/find / -ignore_readdir_race (..." etc. sucking up most of my memory. It runs for a really long time (several hours) and my guess is that its an automated indexing process for my hard drive.
I'm working on a project that requires me to have over 6 million audio files on a mounted SSD so another guess is that the filesystem manager is trying to index all these files for quick search. Is that the case? Is there any way to turn it off for the SSD?
Solution
The locate command reports data collected for its database by a regular cron task. You can exclude directories from the database, making the task run more quickly. According to updatedb.conf(5)
PRUNEPATHS
A whitespace-separated list of path names of directories which should not be scanned by updatedb(8). Each path name must be exactly in the form in which the directory would be reported by locate(1).By default, no paths are skipped.
On my Debian machine for instance, /etc/updatedb.conf contains this line:
PRUNEPATHS="/tmp /var/spool /media"
You could modify your /etc/updatedb.conf to add the directories which you want to ignore. Only the top-level directory of a directory tree need be listed; subdirectories are ignored when the parent is ignored.
Further reading:
Answered By - Thomas Dickey Answer Checked By - Mary Flores (WPSolving Volunteer)