Efficient Usage with 10.2 and later

[Cool01]

I have been using OpenSuSE 10.2 on a "light use" box since the end of January 2007, and slowly building up the workload on it. It is mainly a box I use to do some writing and Internet (Web) research on. I do not even use it for EMail (which is on another machine). I have done some bitmap graphics work on it with "gimp".

Now I am looking at my system and trying to optimize my usage. There are a few things that concern me:

Disc Usage:

I have the following partitions:

"/boot" - 80 MB
"/" - 6 GB
"/home" - 8 GB
"/usr" - 6 GB
"/usr/share" - 6 GB
"/usr/local/data" 12 GB

The interesting thing is that "/" is has 3.8 GB used (about 68%), which is more than I expected at this point. It seems to have filled up surprisingly fast. The main accumulation has to be "tmp" files and such. I have some files in "/root" which are on this partition, but nothing major. I have just gone through the most obvious directories (/var, /etc, /tmp) looking for extraneous stuff, but I cannot account for the build-up.

In "/var/adm/backup" there are a bunch of files named

"YaST2-200ymmdd-0.tar.gz"

These are variable size (the largest is about 2 MB) and I assume are files removed by YaST2 during updates. I think I could delete most of these, leaving maybe the last 2 months worth. Any opinions about that?

Similarly there are a set of files named

"etc.sysconfig-200ymmdd-0.tar.gz"

I assume that these are copies of the all the ".conf" files in "/etc". The files are all around 125.4 KB. I think I will probably delete all except the last 2 months. The sizes are not as significant as the "YaST2" files, but the information probably will not be of much use.

In "/var/log" there are a bunch of files named

"zmd-message.log.200y-mm-dd"

Again, these are not huge files, but I doubt that anything past 2 months is not going to be of any real use to me again.

But all this does not add up to the surprisingly large amount of disc space I have used up in "/". I am wondering if it has to do with "ext3" journaling? Does anyone know of a good description in reasonably simple English describing exactly how "ext3" works?

CPU Usage:

Another thing I notice is that when I start up the system, a couple of minutes after the system has been on, the CPU usage shoots up to 100% and sits there for a long time while a process called "parsing metadata" is running. What is this doing? I have a feeling that this has to do with "ext3" again. Is that what it is?

[gogalthorp]

I think it is a program called Beagle which indexes files. And yes it uses far too much CPU.

[Cool01]

I think it is a program called Beagle which indexes files. And yes it uses far too much CPU.

No, it is not Beagle. You are right about that program though. I watched it one day to see if it ever stops and from what I can tell it never does. That is to say, "beagle" will hold your CPU at 100% literally as long as it is allowed to run. However, I think the priority must be low because it does not seem to interfere with foreground processes much. The exception to that was when I ran the 3D graphics spinning cube test program. I think it cut the frame rate roughly in half.

I have beagle disabled, but present.

But this other CPU eater is something else.

[gogalthorp]

After doing a little Googleing it looks like it is Zen

Read this thread it might help

[opensuse] parse-metadata - ReadList.com