Why is logwatch killing my CPU?

[Steven6702]

I'm running an HP Pavillion dv5000 series notebook with FC9.

Every night at various times I notice that my CPU is working its ass off, and I top to see "perl" listed about 10 times. When I "ps -ef | grep perl" I get a bunch of output pertaining to logwatch. Usually its stuff ending in onlyservice or removeservice. I've looked around a bit and know what logwatch is, but I don't really understand why it's necessary for me on my laptop. Where can I see the logs it generates? Does it actually produce something that might be helpful? Is there some way to turn it off if I don't want it raping my CPU at random times? When I login as root there are no crontabs, not sure if that is what I should be looking under, but I pretty much just don't know what the hell it's doing.

Would appreciate any insight.

[SlowJet]

Logwatch searches through the logs produced by services running.
Those services write logs in
/var/log

The logs to watch are defined in
/etc/logwatch and the cron / acron kick it off when needed.

usually at 4:xx a.m
acron is for missed crons so acron will run about 70 minutes after you boot up.
logwatch only processes the last days activity and sends a summary report to roots mail.

There are several times periods also.
Logwatch standard, logwatch roll logs (Fridays)
A updatedb for locate or find.

Then, usually after a major update or install,
a makewhat is runs, very intense and runs about 30 minutes.

Some run when needed, but mostly in the early am hours, so if yor computer is off,
acron will run about 70 minutes after boot up.

When several of these get occur at once, it seems like your computer is possessed
But the info and work done is very useful..


man logwatch
man cron
/etc
/var/log
SJ