PSARC/2008/078 - postrun - delayed execution environment for procedural package scripts

[Pete Bentley]

On Wed, Feb 06, 2008 at 09:28:39PM +1100, Darren Reed wrote:
> Casper.Dik at Sun.COM wrote:
> > So certainly SOMETHING ran 10,000+ processes.  I've seen complaints about 
> > this in other places too.
> 
> Hmmm, too bad process accounting isn't available early on in bootup,
> that'd at least allow some evidence gathering.

I have observed these processes running and noted at the time that
they were children of postrun - a couple of my test boxes are Netra X1's 
and it's particularly obvious on those machines as postrun can take about 
15 minutes to complete.

Postrun logs its activity to /var/log/postrun.log and the biggest
culprits seem to be the jobs which use gconftool-2 to install
desktop preference "schemas".

I last watched this happening on b71, b81 may have improved as
postrun completes in about 2 minutes on an amd64 box, and I'm pretty
sure earlier builds were taking 5 minutes or more on the same box.

I plan to upgrade at least one X1 to b81 later this week so I'll get
a better idea then.

Pete.