Run tasks asynchronously at boot

Question

[robin@pingwing ~]$ systemd-analyze blame | head -n 5
3.595s updatedb.service
1.403s man-db.service
196ms [email protected]
185ms systemd-logind.service
166ms alsa-restore.service
updatedb and man-db are run every time the system boots (or only the first boot of the day, not sure) to update their databases, which is fine. I like it that way.
As you can clearly see they're not holding up the boot process for too long, although still 90% of the boot time is spent on those 2 services
I was wondering whether there's a way to have them run asyncronously? So they'd still be run every time, but the boot process would continue rather than waiting for those 2 processes to exit.
Thank you.

Answer 1

phw wrote:
Why run those tasks on system startup at all? On my system the man-db service is inactive, but is set to run daily via systemd timers (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sy … ctionality)
I would check your output of
systemctl list-timers
Probably those two services are already there.
[robin@pingwing ~]$ systemctl list-timers
NEXT LEFT LAST PASSED UNIT ACTIVATES
Tue 2014-07-22 00:00:00 CEST 12h left Mon 2014-07-21 11:05:04 CEST 46min ago logrotate.timer logrotate.service
Tue 2014-07-22 00:00:00 CEST 12h left Mon 2014-07-21 11:05:04 CEST 46min ago man-db.timer man-db.service
Tue 2014-07-22 00:00:00 CEST 12h left Mon 2014-07-21 11:05:04 CEST 46min ago shadow.timer shadow.service
Tue 2014-07-22 00:00:00 CEST 12h left Mon 2014-07-21 11:05:04 CEST 46min ago updatedb.timer updatedb.service
Tue 2014-07-22 11:20:08 CEST 23h left Mon 2014-07-21 11:20:08 CEST 31min ago systemd-tmpfiles-clean.timer systemd-tmpfiles-clean.service
So what do I do with this?
Either way, I have no problem with it running at boot. I was just wondering whether I could do it asynchronously.