Hi all! I subscribed to this list to ask about this issue. I've not found almost any coverage on this topic, or then I've searched for wrong keywords on Google and on various mailing lists. My issues is as follows: I've recently upgraded to openSUSE 10.2 from SuSE Linux 9.3 on my desktop PC. This is no server or anything, and I'm the only user. 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. I tried and mounted my /tmp to hdb, to see if the temp directory would be the subject of constant disk I/O (rather logical), especially while running KDE. But the /tmp partition actually shows only very limited read and write actions. If my KDE runs idle without me doing anything in particular, with some applications running such as Kontact, couple of konsoles, Firefox, couple of Konquerors, etc., the tmp sees almost no activity unless some application is operated on. Still, hda is constantly being written to. 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. Almost no reading at all. Then, every so often, maybe after every 2 or 3 minutes (I'm not sure yet if this varies), it writes a bigger burst of data, one that I can easily hear the hard drive doing, and it can least a few seconds, but less than 10 seconds I'd say. 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. I've studied my memory utilisation. I've 512MB of RAM, and despite what "free" shows, this happen. My swap partition is on hdb, so it is not that, and it is almost always zero Kb any way. So the system is not swapping under low memory or anything. My swappiness is "60"; altering this value has no effect. And my memory utilisation (+/- buffers in cache) never seems to go below 300MB free. Anyway, as mentioned, the amount of free memory seems to have no effect on the constant writing on hda. I've searched the web to find something related to this, but have come up with nothing useful. I've closed down all unnecessary processes I know I can, but that has as little effect as anything else I try. None of the logs seem to be flooded with data, and I even turned off firewall logging. I uninstalled all Apparmor etc. stuff and even closed sshd and similar. No effect. I didn't find any way to monitor which files are constantly being written to. One command listed all open files per process, but it prints hundreds of lines, and seems to be of no use for knowing where the constant disk output is headed. 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. 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 partitoons 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? 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. If my hard disk is writing 24h/day, how long will it last before it dies under such server-level use? 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. Linux being a server OS, it may not care by default about my hardware all that much. So I would definitely want to know if there was any way to make the system (Kernel?) not to write non-stop (to /proc? and/or elsewhere), and if this was a symptom of something being wrong somewhere. I've also read on the web about "laptop modes" etc. that avoid excess and unnecessary disk I/O to allow spinn-downs etc. Could something like this be employed on my desktop PC? Would there be anything in /etc/sysconfig to edit--I already even turned off all weird sounding man pages related jobs put there in "cron". And above all, do others' systems show similar disk I/O behaviour? Oh, almost forgot: I don't offer any network services etc. Not even SSH like I used to. Thank you for providing any insight you might have on this. Any kind of advice will be appreciated. I may have forgotten to mention something very elementary that I've tried or looked at, so feel free to ask if you believe I've not checked something obvious. Thank you, Tero Pesonen -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org