mlocate

About

mlocate is a new locate implementation. The ‘m’ stands for “merging”: updatedb reuses the existing database to avoid rereading most of the file system, which makes updatedb faster and does not trash the system caches as much.

The locate(1) utility is intended to be completely compatible to slocate. It also attempts to be compatible to GNU locate, when it does not conflict with slocate compatibility.

Availability

mlocate tarballs are available at fedorahosted.org.

Current version: 0.24

mlocate is also included in Fedora Core 6 and later.

Bugs

Please consider reporting the bug to your distribution’s bug tracking system.

Otherwise, report bugs at https://fedorahosted.org/mlocate/. Bug reports with patches are especially welcome.

Performance

These measurements were obtained with mlocate-0.12 and slocate-2.7. Each time, a computer was booted into single-user mode and after one updatedb run data was collected using slabtop and free. The measurement method is admittedly crude, but I think the numbers represent reality quite well.

Run:	real	user	system	dentry	inode	buffers	cached
slocate	1m32.84	0.704	2.045	134337	170778	85972	8268
mlocate, 1st	1m11.65	0.214	0.908	17766	15642	78452	21340
mlocate, 2nd	37.64	0.105	0.289	17776	15639	33996	21336

real, user, system

as reported by time

dentry, inode

number of active objects in dentrycache and ext3inode_cache, as reported by slabtop

buffers, cached

size of disk buffers and page cache, as reported by free

mlocate has two rows because the first run needs to scan the whole file system, while the subsequent runs can reuse most of the original database.