Suse 8.2 and Susewatcher... hogging resources?
 

When I login to my Suse 8.2 installation, Susewatcher starts hogging all the system resources for as much as a couple minutes. A couple of the Desktop icons will be missing (ones that Suse put there by default, such as the icon for my FAT32 windows partition), and they won't re-appear until it has finished doing its thing (whatever that is). I grinds the hard drive constantly during this time, as if it's searching through every single file for some reason, and it also eats up anywhere from 15% - 50% of my CPU load. The worst part is the hard drive hogging, as it makes everything else that accesses the drive take forever.

My only solution so far has been to try to kill it. However, if I do this then those Desktop icons never appear. It has gotten so I have to just walk away from my computer and let it do its thing for several minutes after I log in.

What on EARTH is it doing, and why? And, how can I stop it?

Thanks for any help...

Perhaps it is swapping. You could use the free command to check for swap activity.

I'm not anywhere near my SuSE machine or I could help you more.

anyways

Enter "ps -aux | grep *watcher*" to find the specific name or you can do "ps -aux | less" to scroll line by line through running processes. You also might try "pstree" to see what SuSEWatcher is doing.

Kill susewatcher "killall susewatcher" or whatever process you identified in the earlier step.

You should look through the /etc/rc.d directory. This is the startup directory for SuSE and might contain a script with references to susewatcher. (I am assuming you are somewhat familiar with bash scripting.) If this problem is only after you login, try other windowmanagers. Does it happen when you start Gnome? Does it happen when you start Blackbox?

Once you find the name of the susewatcher running process and have killed it, find it's path. "which susewatcher" and then see if it is a script or a binary "type /path/to/susewatcher" will tell what type of file it is, or just open it up in a texteditor.

Chances are, it is probably a script. If you can't find the startup references to it anywhere then maybe you could just open it up and find the part that hogs your diskspace and then comment out those lines.

Think about it, what does this program do? A quick google of "+help +susewatcher" told me that susewatcher provides automatic information about available update patches. Do you need that to always run? Not really. Subscribe to the SuSE security mailing list and they can email you when security updates are available. You can also set up a cron job to run SuSE watcher once a day when you are asleep. Play around with YaST. I am sure that you will find susewatcher somewhere.

Links
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html Beginning Bash Scripting
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ Advanced Bash Scripting
http://www.suse.com/en/private/downl...s/82_i386.html download the updates to susewatcher

it's all just a google away

as fun as the command line is, you could just uncheck the box that says 'start automatically'

The problem, however, is that if I kill susewatcher, or don't have it running, then I don't get certain icons on my desktop, ones such as for my CDROM, DVDROM, and Floppy drive, and also for my windows partition. I have no problem killing susewatcher, and I know what it is SUPPOSED to be doing, but why on earth is it cranking my hard drive for several minutes when I start up? And, why does it steal my icons if I kill it?

But, if I do that, then it steals some of my icons....

OK, so I just tried running susewatcher manually after killing it. If I do so, then I get PAGES of this stuff at the command prompt before it completely loads:
---
Invalid entry (missing '=') at /home/shaun/Desktop/_x_vs4k_pov_wtv.zip:15787
Invalid entry (missing ']') at /home/shaun/Desktop/_x_vs4k_pov_wtv.zip:15790
Invalid entry (missing '=') at /home/shaun/Desktop/_x_vs4k_pov_wtv.zip:15791
Invalid entry (missing ']') at /home/shaun/Desktop/_x_vs4k_pov_wtv.zip:15794
Invalid entry (missing ']') at /home/shaun/Desktop/_x_vs4k_pov_wtv.zip:15796
Invalid entry (missing '=') at /home/shaun/Desktop/_x_vs4k_pov_wtv.zip:15798
Invalid entry (missing ']') at /home/shaun/Desktop/_x_vs4k_pov_wtv.zip:15799
Invalid entry (missing '=') at /home/shaun/Desktop/_x_vs4k_pov_wtv.zip:15800
Invalid entry (missing '=') at /home/shaun/Desktop/_x_vs4k_pov_wtv.zip:15801
Invalid entry (missing '=') at /home/shaun/Desktop/_x_vs4k_pov_wtv.zip:15802
Invalid entry (missing '=') at /home/shaun/Desktop/_x_vs4k_pov_wtv.zip:15804
Invalid entry (missing '=') at /home/shaun/Desktop/_x_vs4k_pov_wtv.zip:15806
Invalid entry (missing ']') at /home/shaun/Desktop/_x_vs4k_pov_wtv.zip:15808
---
It gives me hundreds of those for every single file I have on my desktop, with the exact amount depending on the file size. That's what all that hard drive cranking and CPU usage is, it's susewatcher giving thousands of those unintelligible error messages on files it shouldn't be looking at anyhow.

Why on EARTH would it be doing that?!

Anyway, so is what I finally did was make copies of the icons which it steals, put them on the desktop, then uncheck "Start Automatically". So, I've got my icons, and I got rid of the stupud hard-drive-cranking-lag for several minutes at bootup. I guess that means the problem is solved.

Though, I'm still EXTREMELY curious as to what the heck it was doing and why. If anyone has any clues, I would be most appreciative.
I did like having it checking for updates for me... I'm on too many mailing lists and message boards already, I don't need to have another one for my updates when it is capable for just giving me a little icon when some are available. It's just not worth doing so if it's going to lag my system at bootup.