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).
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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.
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...
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?
Only because you've become aware of it, I'd say.
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.
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! 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!
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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!
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Thank you, Tero Pesonen
Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org