> How important is it to have the update daemon running? What would be the
> consequence(s) if it is not loaded? In other words, is it really necessary?
>
> CameronBean@ptloma.edu
> Point Loma Nazarene College
>
Update periodically flushes dirty file-buffers to disk. If it isn't
running, and your machine works perfectly, you will only notice that
RAM seems to disappear as more and more buffers are allocated and not
freed. The dirty file buffers will get flushed to disk when the disks
are dismounted during a normal shutdown. This presumes that everything
works perfectly.
BUT.... If your maching ever crashes, depending upon how much file I/O
you have done, you may be left with an unrepairable file-system because
of data which was left in RAM during your last crash, that should have
been written to disk.
Cheers,
DJ
Richard B. Johnson
Analogic Corporation
Penguin : Linux version 2.1.44 on an i586 machine (66.15 BogoMips).
Warning : It's hard to stay on the trailing edge of technology.
Linux : Engineering tool
Windows : Typewriter