Good day Ubuntu developers

I found no thread about this program.

I believe popcon is a valuable sampling program.

The System monitor is always running on my Ubuntu 12.04 desktop . So when response drops I switch to see why and popularity-con is active.
The priority is shown as very low but my active program practically stops for up to a minute. This status lasts for maybe half an hour.

So I have done some digging and found this in the FAQ:
"Under the default configuration of cron, this happens at 6:47 in the morning.
This can be changed by editing /etc/crontab but if your computer is not always turned on, we really recommend you install the anacron package."

Because I am a retired end user I only run the PC a few hours a day. Please advise me how to use anacron or how else to avoid the slow-down.

I do not want to remove popcon. In fact I suggest the data could be used to limit software upgrades to only the programs that are used every month.

Thanks for your kind attention. Chas IRONS (ironscf)

There may be a few Ubuntu developers who post here but mostly they reside at canonical.com or ubuntu.com. The Ubuntu site is an excellent source of information specific to Ubuntu. Your question does not seem to be specific to Ubuntu. If you have a cron entry running the script at a specific time you could just run the script after booting manually or installing anacron should be as simple as: sudo apt-get install anacron. You could install it from the Ubuntu Software Center. Anacron has been around for a long time and you should be able to find countless tutorials on using it.

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Thanks Yancek for your reply.

After advice from
Bill Allombert <ballombe@debian.org>
popcon-developers@lists.alioth.debian.org

I took the option of switching off popcon.
I am not confident of doing the changes nor that they would suit me.

Regards. Chas.I

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Do you remember if you turned it on upon installing (like most installers options) or is it a default set being Ubuntu and all? Not that there's any thing wrong with a popularity-contest...

Hi jamison20000e

I certainly did not switch it on and only noticed the effect this year after using Ubuntu 12.04 since 2012.

I think I have stopped it now so will wait and see.

Thanks for your interest.

Ubuntu like Google probably hopes you don't read the fine print.

Interesting thread. I never had trouble with the Popcon under Ubuntu but have not run anything from them since Xubuntu-testing 12.04 and simply deleted those partitions when that was released.

Popcon is supposed to query your system for packages added or removed from the system once a week and add those stats to the data base. This is then supposed to be used in the selection of packages installed by default with the next version of the OS.

That is what it was designed to do by Debian and what it still does for Debian.

Ubuntu? Who the hell knows.

When you are installing Debian you have a question as to whether you wish to participate and the default answer is no. I always choose yes, personally because I think it is important information for the release team to have.

I would not feel this way if it were screwing with my system.

I would really like to know why this is running apparently daily and really suspect that this could be a real problem. Sounds like, at best, it is poorly implemented by Ubuntu and, at worst, doing something other than exactly what it is supposed to be doing.

If I were in your chair running your install, having had no option of refusing this application, I would disable it.

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It seems odd to me as well this package has never caused problems for me.I agree 100% (opposite here) usually I'm "screwing with my system" and am sporadic in my package selection so feel it's not useful thus keep default "no" but sometimes setting up an OS for average use or gaming and so I opt in.

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I don't think popcon runs daily but thanks to your advice I have changed the option to NO

Another program that has a similar effect but only for about 10 minutes is updatedb.mlocate

If someone with Linux Questions experience forwarded this thread to the Ubuntu people it might resolve the issue too ?

Being part of locate file finder. I would not touch updatedb in mlocate myself.

http://postmyimage.com/img2/594_screenshot1.jpg

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http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1243951&page=2
Re-enableable: http://askubuntu.com/questions/26813...datedb-mlocate

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