Thank you both Kenneth and Randall for your input. I've quoted below. Nothing important any more on this matter, though. On Sat, 30 Jun 2007, Randall R Schulz wrote:
On Saturday 30 June 2007 15:16, Tero Pesonen wrote:
Hi all!
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I've noticed that at least on my upgraded installation the system seems to be almost constantly accessing through file I/O's the "/" mounted disk and also the "/home" partition. I realised this as I studied the output given by "iostat." If I leave it to monitor the system while running X and KDE, it shows constant "blocks written" action on hda, which contains both the root partition "/" and home partitions.
It may just be the updatedb process, which indexes all known files so you can find them by name (or name fragment or pattern).
I also considered something like this, but eventually went down, as suggested earlier to me off-list, to minimum level of running processes through Yast services per run level editor. This didn't have any effect on the constant writing at the time, so I simply shut down for the night. Today, I booted and realized that at least so far it seems that disk access is greatly reduced. If I'm not doing something, the systems isn't writing fevorously, but only writes a few hundred blocks per a ten second period. Seems and sounds more like the way things were on SuSE 9.3 (and 8.2 before it) based on my not-so-scientific listen-with-an-ear meter.
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How does it show? Well, first of all, there's constantly (every few seconds) from some 8 to few dozens blocks being written, according to iostat. ...
You do realize, don't you, that this is really just a trickle of data. If your system were busy doing things you thought were important (perhaps a complex query or update on a large database), the presence or absence of this additional I/O volume would go entirely unnoticed and be unmeasurable against such an application load.
Of course. This is/was not a performance issue. Rather, I was worried if there was something fishy going on--something wrong with my setup. Well, there wasn't.
This constant writing (constant writing plus regular bursts) is done irrespective to the activity of the desktop. Whether I do something or not, this happens. Even when back on pure console on run level 3.
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So I tried to find via kfind which files have most recently been written to (access date changed to current.) There were tons of those, but at least it seems that in /sys and especially in /proc huge amount of files are updated so that they're always marked as having been updated at the same time as the current time shown by system clock. Not even a minute behind, never.
Try to think of it as really fresh data. Like really fresh food. ... Or whatever it takes to change your worry into calmness...
Well, I was thinking of it more as unnecessarily produced junk food than fresh food per se, but from now on I will adopt that view. After all, from the operating system's point of view, no data or task is useless if it is being done.
Might this folder be the subject to this constant disk output? It seems it could be, or at least could be one of the culprits.
All my hda partitions were formatted for SuSE 9.3 when it was installed, and are ReiserFS. According to Yast partitioner, they seem to have been set to "ordered data mode" from the three possible (journal, ordered, writeback.) This is what was then set by default, as I don't remember to having changed those.
Why is this constant I/O a problem?
Only because you've become aware of it, I'd say.
That's probably it. And now it's down any way, after shutting down anything unnecessary as mentioned earlier. Which may not be all that bad thing to have come to pass, so to say, considering that I've never seen such free +- buffers/cache numbers upon system start-up as I did today. Which means more memory for Firefox to hog and eat away.
Well, I have a feeling my old SuSE 9.3 did not do this. What is more, I'm worried if my poor IDE hard drive can take all this strain the system is putting on it.
Strain? Hardly! Try not to think of it as someone barking orders at you, wearing you down and exhausting your. Computer hardware really isn't like a biological organism.
OK, ok... "strain" wasn't perhaps the most spot-on English word to choose, nor was it very technical to refer to a piece of electronics as "poor." My HDD's are poor only in the sense that they've been put together from the cheapest possible components to guarantee (on average) a certain expected life span under average home PC use, so as to make it financially feasible for Seagate to grant them a certain kind of warranty period. And no, I don't believe there's a hard-working gnome living under my desk or anything... one whose back could break under excess "strain." :)
If my hard disk is writing 24h/day, how long will it last before it dies under such server-level use?
Evidently you don't know what constitutes "server-level" use!
No, of course I didn't mean it literally.
Servers will sustain _continuous_ loads near their rated maximum for hours and hours on end! What you've described is nothing like that level of load.
The heads need to constantly move and write... and these standard IDE HDD's are definitely no server level units that are designed to perform under constant stress.
The best thing to do is to refrain from anthropomorphizing computer hardware!
I needed a dictionary for that word of your's. Yes, I shall refrain from anthropo... well gnomemizing.
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And above all, do others' systems show similar disk I/O behaviour?
Yes. All Linux systems are logging all the time. They do daily bookkeeping, which for systems that are not kept on 24 hours per day, will happen as soon as they're started up each day. Computers are rarely quiescent in any literal sense. They're always doing things. That's why we have them!
Yes. Thanks for your comments. There's even a new English word for me, "quiescent." -- Tero Pesonen -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org