Upgrade to a more recent findutils build

For getting information about your system please provide the output of the terminal commands

uname -a
lsb_release -crid
apt-cache policy findutils

According to http://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/ and http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/findutils/ the last official version is 4.4.2 which is the version in the supported Ubuntu releases.

Ubuntu standard is to stay on the official versions and not to use development versions.

Thank you for the response.

I guess it makes sense to use whatever the developers of the package declare as stable.
But in this particular case the most recent stable release is quite old.
That is why I was wondering what would be the best approach.
I should probably ask on the findutils mailing list what is their release and maintenance policy.

As for my box, I have Ubuntu 15.04 and findutils 4.4.2, commands output at the bottom.
As specified in the first message, 4.4.2 is a pretty old release of findutils.
There are bugfixes that are affecting how updatedb works.

For example, here is what find 4.4.2 shows on my box:

    illia@illia-vm1:~$ find / -maxdepth 1 -printf '%F %p\n'

    ext4 /
    ext4 /etc
    ext4 /opt
    ext2 /boot
    proc /proc
    ext4 /lib32
    ext4 /home
    devtmpfs /dev
    ext4 /var
    ext4 /hbuild
    ext4 /tmp
    ext4 /sbin
    ext4 /media
    ext4 /lost+found
    ext4 /lib64
    ext4 /usr
    ext4 /build
    ext4 /vol
    sysfs /sys
    ext4 /root
    ext4 /sources
    ext4 /bin
    tmpfs /run
    ext4 /lib
    ext4 /srv
    ext4 /mnt
    ext4 /cdrom

And here is what the current version (4.5.15) of find shows:

    illia@illia-vm1:~$ ~/works/findutils/find/find / -maxdepth 1 -printf '%F %p\n'
    ext4 /
    ext4 /etc
    ext4 /opt
    ext2 /boot
    proc /proc
    ext4 /lib32
    ext4 /home
    devtmpfs /dev
    ext4 /var
    nfs /hbuild
    ext4 /tmp
    ext4 /sbin
    ext4 /media
    ext4 /lost+found
    ext4 /lib64
    ext4 /usr
    nfs4 /build
    nfs /vol
    sysfs /sys
    ext4 /root
    cifs /sources
    ext4 /bin
    tmpfs /run
    ext4 /lib
    ext4 /srv
    ext4 /mnt
    ext4 /cdrom

Notice how "/hbuild", "/build", "/vol", and "/sources" are shown as "ext4" in the first output, and as "nfs" and "cifs" in the second.
updatedb relies on those file system types to exclude network mounted files systems when generating local files database.
In my case it is trying to index files systems with enormous amounts of files over the network.
Slowing my system and using all the free memory for disk caches.
It also does not happen always but quire frequently for me to be annoyed.

I guess it might be backport just the bugfix into 4.4 branch.

    illia@illia-vm1:~$ uname -a
    Linux illia-vm1 3.19.0-18-generic #18-Ubuntu SMP Tue May 19 18:31:35 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
    illia@illia-vm1:~$ lsb_release -crid
    Distributor ID: Ubuntu
    Description: Ubuntu 15.04
    Release: 15.04
    Codename: vivid
    illia@illia-vm1:~$ apt-cache policy findutils
    findutils:
      Installed: 4.4.2-9build1
      Candidate: 4.4.2-9build1
      Version table:
     *** 4.4.2-9build1 0
            500 http://mirror.os6.org/ubuntu/ vivid/main amd64 Packages
            100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

I suggest that you create a bug report. Maybe it is possible to backport the relevant bug fixes into the 4.4.2 version.

Or you can try compiling a 4.5.* version for yourself (Debian experimental has 4.5.14-2).