Keep periodic unix processes from messing up your gigs

Sometimes while performing or working on audio/video, my hard disk activity light goes crazy. Top shows updatedb, makewhatis, and similar tasks running. With a well-tuned low-latency/realtime kernel the audio process should continue without dropouts... and indeed with the current ccrma kernels audio is fairly stable. But media access from disk can be slowed down (at least until preemption is perfected), and there's no need to be trying your luck. Keep the system load more constant and predictable by temporarily

These periodic (hourly/daily/monthly) processes are controlled by crond (old-school) and anachrond (new-school). Before a gig, run the following two commands as root:

[root@localhost]~# service crond stop
[root@localhost]~# service anacron stop

They'll be running again after a restart, which should be fine. Or run the above commands with "start" in place of "stop".

BTW, "service --display-all" gives a handy rundown of available services and prints detailed stats for some.