I’ve had an issue with some of my Ubuntu VM’s lately destroying the available resources on my ESXi box. The hard drives were going crazy due to a combination of normal disk access and also memory paging into swap file.
Running top showed a process “update-apt-xapi” which was top of the charts for memory and cpu usage.
I googled around a bit, and found that the update-apt-xapian-index process is Ubuntu’s way of updating the synaptic indexing. Considering this is a cli-only vm where I use puppet to manage the packaging, it’s useless. Also, there’s many many many posts on the web about this package going mental on low-resource machines.
As a test I removed the package from the VM that kept having issues with the following commands:
sudo apt-get autoremove --purge apt-xapian-index
This removed the package and dumped all config/storage of the files.
After leaving it for a few days it was fine, so I added the following config to puppet to make sure all my machines remove it:
package{ 'apt-xapian-index' : ensure => purged }
Within an hour or so this had run through all my managed VM’s and the problem shouldn’t occur again.