I ditched WindowsXP for Fedora for a few weeks now and am loving it, but the past few days i've noticed something odd. At seemingly random times, my hard drive will be doing stuff even when idle, and it appears to be slowing my system down a bit as well. I only noticed because my case is off and my hard drive is somewhat noisy.

looking through the gnome-system-monitor it appears that a process 'updatedb' is running using about 3% CPU usage. Ater a few minutes it goes away.

Curious to know what the hell updatedb is, what it is doing, and is it possible to safely stop it doing running?

Any help appreciated.

it update the slocate database so that when u type : locate <file> , it will instantly tell u where it is

i don't understand why we have to keep doing updatedb in order to keep the search or find files option to work...one would think that it would update automatically...but it doesn't....after 8 days i get a message that i have to run the update in order to find files...so i do...in fedora....if it's doing it automatically....it's not a waste of time....it's necessary....in Mandrake i have to do it manually