[Fwd: Re: [SLE] HD being accessed]
Gentlemen, I thank you all for your comments about my question about why my HD is being accessed every 5 seconds and how to stop it but, as you all know, my HD is still being accessed every 5 seconds and I still don't know how to stop this. It also looks like nobody at SuSE reads this forum or if they do then they couldn't be bothered to come up with the answer. This being a SuSE mailing group then it would be safe to assume that everybody here must be running SuSE. May I then ask how /your/ system is behaving? Is your HD being accessed every 5 seconds, or in some other regular pattern? This 5 second access is occurring here on 3 computers with SuSE 8 installed on them but a friend of mine went back and installed v7.2 on one of his computers to check this timing thingie out and found that the accessing time was around every 25 seconds rather than 5 seconds in version 8.0 It would be nice to get your responses on this which may lead to some picture being formed about what, and why, is causing this 5 second access.Is this happening to you and which version are you running? My computer is switched on around 1000 hours and switched off around 0330 hours the next day. Now this is a heck of a lot of unnecessary read/write head activity over this period. Cheers.
to stop this. It also looks like nobody at SuSE reads this forum or if they do then they couldn't be bothered to come up with the answer.
This list is a courtesy service provided by SuSE. It's not a right. You're not entitled to answers to your questions, and snotty comments won't actually help you get one. If you pay SuSE for a support call I'm sure they'll do their best to get you sorted out. -- 3:21pm up 46 days, 7:28, 1 user, load average: 0.02, 0.06, 0.01
nobody at SuSE reads this forum or if they do then they couldn't be bothered to come up with the answer.
Well we've gone over this at some length - it's a SuSE user list, occasionally some SuSE staff read part of it, but in general it's a self-help list. They don't have dedicated support staff sifting these lists and most people don't want to pay the extra that would put on to the distro price.
This being a SuSE mailing group then it would be safe to assume that everybody here must be running SuSE. May I then ask how /your/ system is behaving? Is your HD being accessed every 5 seconds, or in some other regular pattern?
Yes, they all tend to tap away at the disk on a frequent basis paging things out and doing little jobs. Some do it more than others, and on some it's louder and you notice more. I don't think you should worry about it, though those with greater expertise may be able to put you straight on that. HTH Fergus
Dear Basil, I am NOT an experianced Linux person, but I think that helps me sympathize with your situation. I have 8.0 on a smp pentium iii sys that has LVM (Logical Volume Manager ) Disk sub-sys. The disk sys is both SCSI and ATA. The LVM layer probably masks or obscures disk operation specific info; ie it is not clear and obvious as to which physical disk drive any particular record is written. But I do have an 'Activity LED' for ATA and SCSI. So, let me tell you what I have observed on my ONE system: I see a very brief 'blip' of the SCSI LED every 4 sec. I see very little to no regular LED flashes on the ATA-EIDE LED. It may be possible for you to use TOP (table of Processes) to watch your system at a slightly more detailed level. You may also consider 'killing' processes one at a time to see by elimination which 'kill' stopped the disk activity. This may require carefull note taking and reboots. This following is just some speculation on my part: Regularity suggests a sys management type of process such as 'swapping' or monitoring, or logging, or debugging. There is always a slight possiblity of "Activity of a fraudulent or seripticious nature" ie cracking, crimminal exploits. But the likelyhood of that is probably low. Take your time, be carefull with notes and such and you may discover what is going on. PeterB p.s. These lists can sometimes be a bit frustraiting, but THIS list is remarkably good at helping it's subscribers; be patient; the list works on SHARED EXPERIANCE, so until a few users have 'solved' or 'explained' any new bug or quirk there is little to SHARE. You must also consider the possiblity that YOU are the FIRST to see IT. "All bugs are deep to the first bugee" (I said that) On Friday 28 June 2002 09:10, Basil Chupin wrote:
Gentlemen,
I thank you all for your comments about my question about why my HD is being accessed every 5 seconds and how to stop it but, as you all know, my HD is still being accessed every 5 seconds and I still don't know how to stop this. It also looks like nobody at SuSE reads this forum or if they do then they couldn't be bothered to come up with the answer.
This being a SuSE mailing group then it would be safe to assume that everybody here must be running SuSE. May I then ask how /your/ system is behaving? Is your HD being accessed every 5 seconds, or in some other regular pattern?
This 5 second access is occurring here on 3 computers with SuSE 8 installed on them but a friend of mine went back and installed v7.2 on one of his computers to check this timing thingie out and found that the accessing time was around every 25 seconds rather than 5 seconds in version 8.0
It would be nice to get your responses on this which may lead to some picture being formed about what, and why, is causing this 5 second access.Is this happening to you and which version are you running?
My computer is switched on around 1000 hours and switched off around 0330 hours the next day. Now this is a heck of a lot of unnecessary read/write head activity over this period.
Cheers.
On Friday 28 June 2002 3:10 pm, Basil Chupin wrote:
I thank you all for your comments about my question about why my HD is being accessed every 5 seconds and how to stop it but, as you all know, my HD is still being accessed every 5 seconds and I still don't know how to stop this. It also looks like nobody at SuSE reads this forum or if they do then they couldn't be bothered to come up with the answer.
Really? I thought someone already explained about journaling filesystems writing to disk? What are you running ReiserFS? Ext3? You could stop the HD access by running ext2 or another non-journalling FS. Personally I'd rather have the disk writes than lose my whole HD in one fell swoop. Each to their own I guess. Some reading material: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-fs.html http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Filesystems-HOWTO.html Jon
On Sat, 29 Jun 2002 00:10:57 +1000 Basil Chupin <blchupin@tpg.com.au> wrote:
Gentlemen,
I thank you all for your comments about my question about why my HD is being accessed every 5 seconds and how to stop it but, as you all know, my HD is still being accessed every 5 seconds and I still don't know how to stop this. It also looks like nobody at SuSE reads this forum or if
The thing to do is turn off all servers and daemons, and reboot with nothing running. No cron, no apache, nothing but your syslogd running. Then see if the 5 sec access is still there. If it is, post the output of 'ps auxww' and a tail of your /var/log/messages. If you don't see the 5 sec access, start your daemons and servers, 1 by 1, while constantly monitoring your logs, and the hd access. You will find your culprit. It's probably some app issuing an error message, or you have full debugging output set for your firewall logging. The guys on this list can only guess at what your machine is doing, you have to get in there and trace it out. -- use Perl; #powerful programmable prestidigitation
On Friday 28 June 2002 09:10, Basil Chupin wrote:
Gentlemen,
I thank you all for your comments about my question about why my HD is being accessed every 5 seconds and how to stop it but, as you all know, my HD is still being accessed every 5 seconds and I still don't know how to stop this. It also looks like nobody at SuSE reads this forum or if they do then they couldn't be bothered to come up with the answer.
This being a SuSE mailing group then it would be safe to assume that everybody here must be running SuSE. May I then ask how /your/ system is behaving? Is your HD being accessed every 5 seconds, or in some other regular pattern?
This 5 second access is occurring here on 3 computers with SuSE 8 installed on them but a friend of mine went back and installed v7.2 on one of his computers to check this timing thingie out and found that the accessing time was around every 25 seconds rather than 5 seconds in version 8.0
It would be nice to get your responses on this which may lead to some picture being formed about what, and why, is causing this 5 second access.Is this happening to you and which version are you running?
My computer is switched on around 1000 hours and switched off around 0330 hours the next day. Now this is a heck of a lot of unnecessary read/write head activity over this period.
Cheers.
Hey, Running 8.0 here also, and it also is accessing my drive every 5-6 seconds. I find no slow down from it though, and it hasn't interrupted anything in my work or play on the system. John -- M$...we don' need no steenking security!
On Sat, 2002-06-29 at 00:10, Basil Chupin wrote:
This being a SuSE mailing group then it would be safe to assume that everybody here must be running SuSE. May I then ask how /your/ system is behaving? Is your HD being accessed every 5 seconds, or in some other regular pattern?
Yes, I observed this also. In my case lights on the computer cases don't actually flash (maybe bursts of data are too short to activate it?) but I can observe them as a row of little "pings" in gkrellm, which I tend to keep running on my desktops. As others noted, I think the journaling file system is to "blame" for this, because it occurs on both of my machines - one runs Suse 8.0 with Reiserfs, the other Mandrake 8.2 with ext3. Both machines run KDE or Gnome at different times, and this behaviour persists in all combinations of systems and desktops. I'd suggest, don't stress too much over this. --------------------------------------------------------------------- "The earth has enough for everyone's needs, but not for some people's greed." - Gandhi -- 10:20am up 2 days, 19:07, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00--
Strange, I am running SuSE8.0, and when I was watching, it was about 50 seconds between the led flash. On Saturday 29 June 2002 03:14, andrew fries wrote:
On Sat, 2002-06-29 at 00:10, Basil Chupin wrote:
This being a SuSE mailing group then it would be safe to assume that everybody here must be running SuSE. May I then ask how /your/ system is behaving? Is your HD being accessed every 5 seconds, or in some other regular pattern?
Yes, I observed this also. In my case lights on the computer cases don't actually flash (maybe bursts of data are too short to activate it?) but I can observe them as a row of little "pings" in gkrellm, which I tend to keep running on my desktops.
As others noted, I think the journaling file system is to "blame" for this, because it occurs on both of my machines - one runs Suse 8.0 with Reiserfs, the other Mandrake 8.2 with ext3. Both machines run KDE or Gnome at different times, and this behaviour persists in all combinations of systems and desktops.
I'd suggest, don't stress too much over this.
--------------------------------------------------------------------- "The earth has enough for everyone's needs, but not for some people's greed." - Gandhi -- 10:20am up 2 days, 19:07, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00--
-- Frits J. Wüthrich (Sent with Kmail)
On Sat, 2002-06-29 at 00:10, Basil Chupin wrote:
This being a SuSE mailing group then it would be safe to assume that everybody here must be running SuSE. May I then ask how /your/ system is behaving? Is your HD being accessed every 5 seconds, or in some other regular pattern?
Hi: In /usr/share/doc/howto/en/html_single/From-PowerUp-To-Bash-Prompt-HOWTO.html I find the following: The daemons kflushd and kupdate handle this work: kupdate runs periodically (5 seconds?) to check whether there are any dirty buffers. Could that explain your harddrive being accessed? -- Regards, gr, in /usually/ sunny, balmy Florida's Suncoast.
participants (10)
-
andrew fries -
Basil Chupin -
Derek Fountain -
Fergus Wilde -
Frits J. Wüthrich -
gilson redrick -
john -
Jonathan Lim -
Peter B Van Campen -
zentara