metalayer-crawler eating 100% of my cpu constantly why?
 

what is this program for exactly? ive had my n800 for about 2 weeks now and never had a problem until today its using 100% all the time

Re: metalayer-crawler eating 100% of my cpu constantly why?
 

It does that from time to time. Before you know it your N800's battery is dead in the morning.

The metalayer-crawler is a program which crawls your SD cards and flash memory to find media files. I have no idea why that's even needed, as I don't seem to have any problems with my media player after I disabled the metalayer-crawler.

The reason I disabled it was because it ran wild and depleted my battery twice. This is how to disable it. You need xterm installed, and becomeroot.

(Note spelling of the script in /etc/init.d/)
The above should fix it, to be certain you may want to reboot. Check afterwards with 'ps -ef|grep metal' to see that it's not running anymore.

I did the above many months ago and haven't had any battery issues since.

Re: metalayer-crawler eating 100% of my cpu constantly why?
 

will it go away or do i have to do that?

Re: metalayer-crawler eating 100% of my cpu constantly why?
 

This is not a clean the wrong way to disable it; you should rather rename /etc/rc2.d/S99metalayer-crawler0:
It will cause problems until you disable it, at least under OS2007.

Re: metalayer-crawler eating 100% of my cpu constantly why?
 

out of curiosity, if you disable it can you trigger a manual update easily?

Re: metalayer-crawler eating 100% of my cpu constantly why?
 

Benson:

The way I disable it is perfectly clean, because the metalayer-startup script checks for the existence of /usr/sbin/metalayer-crawler and exits cleanly if it's not there.

pixelseventy2: Presumably it's possible to simply execute /usr/sbin/metalayer-crawler.disabled from the command line, as 'user' (not root), but I haven't tried. Particularly as I haven't figured out any point in running it.. :)

Re: metalayer-crawler eating 100% of my cpu constantly why?
 

Have you created any symbolic links in the filesystem recently? I had a similar problem with the metalayer crawler when I though it would be a good idea to link from the documents folder (accessible in the file manager) to the root folder: it means you can browse the whole filesystem from the file manager but really upsets the crawler.

Re: metalayer-crawler eating 100% of my cpu constantly why?
 

Sorry, that was perhaps not the best way of wording it. Clean does imply a particular reason of undesirability, which is not perhaps the best in this state.

Things may exit cleanly that way, but it leaves the system in a non-standard state, with the possibility for future troubles from new and/or updated software.

But you've got a standard sysv init system; the thing to do is not to go around it, but to use it. Then the system is in a standard state, and no package can have troubles.

Re: metalayer-crawler eating 100% of my cpu constantly why?
 

Even though I can agree with the sysv init aspect, there's nothing in the two different ways of disabling the crawler that is in any way better or worse for the package, certainly nothing that'll cause trouble with the debian packaging system. It'll be a hack any which way it's done, and there are other ways too. The way I would prefer is really to dpkg --purge the whole package, as to me it's mostly junk. Didn't try that though, so I don't know if something else is set to depend on it.

Re: metalayer-crawler eating 100% of my cpu constantly why?
 

@ta-t3, without it, media player won't pick up new files, will it? I have an 8gb SD card just for music in my n800, and I periodically update the contents. canola rescanns att start, but I didn't think mediaplayyer did?

Re: metalayer-crawler eating 100% of my cpu constantly why?
 

https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=978

Comment #0 describes a way to prevent the crawler from running wild across the filesystem and pegging your CPU. This has been working okay for me.

Re: metalayer-crawler eating 100% of my cpu constantly why?
 

just disabled it with the command benson gave and ive noticed signifigant improvement already , especially in startup time. i checked to see if it was running using my statusbar cpu applet Thanks!!!

Re: metalayer-crawler eating 100% of my cpu constantly why?
 

Perhaps I'm wrong; I thought debian would refuse (without special instructions) to overwrite files during an upgrade that have been changed from the original package? I'm no debian expert, so perhaps I was off-base there.

My way is not a hack; that's how you are supposed to enable/disable services in a given runlevel on a sysv setup.

I agree that if you have no intention of running it, the best recourse is to uninstall it; but I'm leaving the built-in media player on for playing the odd video clip from the internet. I just don't need it building a database, because I don't play my audio with it.

Re: metalayer-crawler eating 100% of my cpu constantly why?
 

so which is the best and easiest method? I dont wanna **** something up ive never messed with editing stuff like this. I still want the medi player to find new files if i add them will this effect that?

Re: metalayer-crawler eating 100% of my cpu constantly why?
 

This happened to me an hour ago. It might be because I removed the external memory card and put it back in while the N800 was running. A restart cured it.

Re: metalayer-crawler eating 100% of my cpu constantly why?
 

Benson,
There's no problem upgrading a package if you have changed the name of a file, it's as if you have removed it - it'll in any case simply write a new version of the original file (in other words, re-installing the upgraded application, and leaving your original renamed file in place). Exactly the same will happen when you rename (move) the rc.d script though, so the two ways of disabling the crawler are equally "bad" seen from the point of DPKG.

pixelseventy2:
So far I'm not aware of any side effects of disabling the crawler, but then again I don't keep media player running. Whenever I want to watch or listen to something I start it via the file manager, which is how I would always use a media player - and as the Nokia-provided one doesn't have a built-in file manager, I simply use the normal one.

Re: metalayer-crawler eating 100% of my cpu constantly why?
 

Does this bug plague IT's running OS2008?

Re: metalayer-crawler eating 100% of my cpu constantly why?
 

I haven't seen it in 2008. I had this issue under 2007.

Re: metalayer-crawler eating 100% of my cpu constantly why?
 

I actually noticed it hit... 116% yesterday on OS2008. I didn't think to screencap it.

Re: metalayer-crawler eating 100% of my cpu constantly why?
 

An occasional burst of Meta activity is normal I believe, but what I think this person is seeing and what i saw was that Meta would kick in, usually at boot time and simply go on and on and on eventually killing the battery. I had to remove Canola because eventually I tracked it down to that program. I'm not blaming Canola but as soon as I removed it I had no more problems. I have it on 2008 OS now though. ;-)

Every now and then I see it come up briefly ( min or two). I can deal with that though.

Re: metalayer-crawler eating 100% of my cpu constantly why?
 

Symlinks caused problems with metacrawler for me too. Make sure you don't have any symlinks.

Re: metalayer-crawler eating 100% of my cpu constantly why?
 

FWIW, I've had metalayer-crawler eating all my battery even though I haven't made any symlinks. There's some inherent problem not related to (the known problems with) symlinks or bad cards.