Bug 673594

Summary:	preload is preloading lots of GB of useless data
Product:	[openSUSE] openSUSE 11.3	Reporter:	Jochen Katz <jochen.katz>
Component:	Basesystem	Assignee:	Stephan Kulow <coolo>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity:	Normal
Priority:	P3 - Medium	CC:	j.lange, tschmidt
Version:	Final
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	x86-64
OS:	openSUSE 11.3
Whiteboard:
Found By:	---	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Jochen Katz 2011-02-19 19:27:55 UTC

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; de; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 SUSE/3.6.13-3.1 Firefox/3.6.13

I have vmware server installed, which seems to access some small parts of all .vmdk files during bootup. Preload therefore tries to load the complete vmdk files during bootup.

As there is no manual page, no /usr/share/doc/packages/preload/README, no --help param, no config files, I consider the above behaviour a BUG.



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create some big files on the hard disk
2. Create an init script that reads small parts of these big files
3. Watch what happens
Actual Results:  
preload reads tons of useless data

Expected Results:  
Some configuration option to exclude paths/files from preloading

Comment 1 John Lange 2011-03-10 17:02:24 UTC

I second this bug report. I run VirtualBox and have had the same problem on two different laptops running both 11.2 and 11.3. Instead of only 30 seconds, boot time is now as much as 5 minutes.

I actually started running top in TTY9 so I could kill it since there is no way to do so during boot.

Also the complete lack of documentation on preload is frustrating. There used to be a way to configure preload so you could tell it which files to include/exclude but this no longer exists in current versions.

Comment 2 Stephan Kulow 2011-09-01 11:43:02 UTC

I dropped preload for 12.1