Resource hog: update-apt-xapi solution

[TWPonKubuntu]

I've been experiencing slow boot on an old laptop and this is the result of my "fix" research;

Laptop: HP pavilion, 512MB ram, single processor
OS: Kubuntu 14.04.2 up-to-date as of this date

Symptoms: Boot operation is periodically slowed by the process "update-apt-xapi", the name for which is truncated from "update-apt-xapian-index".

Using either the system monitor gui or "top" in Konsole, the culprit was the above mentioned process, which was taking all available processor cycles, causing a total of 100% CPU usage and causing all other processes to stop/delay for up to 15 minutes.

Solution: Web search found this link, the instructions work ON_MY_MACHINE, so your mileage may vary.

http://vk5hse.blogspot.com/2014/08/ubuntu-apt-xapian-index-update-manager.html

Note that the solution invovles installing the "cpulimit" tool and editing a file in the /etc/cron.weekly directory. Not hard to implement.

This works for me and if your situation is similar, it may work for you.

This problem only appears when you have a resource-poor system, such as this one. You may not notice it on a multi-processor system with lots of ram. I only found it after I installed 14.04 LTS on a laptop.

Also, this has been a reported problem since at least 2010 and I'm not sure it has been fixed in newer versions...
FYI

[jlittle]

IME 1 GiB of RAM isn't enough for Kubuntu, hats off to you if you've made a usable system with half that. Can you run a browser in that?
I'd have thought Lubuntu would be a better fit out of the box, uses ~ 170 kiB logged in.

Regards, John Little

[TWPonKubuntu]

...Can you run a browser in that?...
Regards, John Little

Yes John, I run Kongueror, Firefox ver. 38 from the repository and Firefox-dev ver. 40, of course not simultaneously, and there is a lag. Which is nothing compared to how slow Windoze XP was running on it before I upgraded.

I had the 14.04 DVD, so I switched hard drives (40GB) and spent a few days downloading and configuring.
I removed all the desktop bells and whistles using System Settings/Desktop Effects. The swap file is 2GB and it does get used, <g> The installation occupies around 7.5 GB and I have 19.5GB left in my /home partition after installing Firefox, Thunderbird and loading a set of backup data (10GB) from my desktop.

I also needed to disable both the screen saver and the power management, which do not allow me to recover from a "time-out" event. They just showed a black screen and locked me out, forcing a full manual power down. The hardware is a little old, so not surprising.

I also run Thunderbird or KMail. Which are a little more touchy and do fail to load a about 25% of the time. A system reboot usually fixes this.

It's not blazingly fast, but it does work, I'm writing this on it...