I asked:
> > Is this normal? Is there any way to stop it (it can't be good for
> > the drive)?
PFJ wrote:
> Is it normal? Depends on lots of things. Biggest two is finding the app
> causing the hammering and reporting it into bugzilla (if it is a bug
> that is), the second is the amount of memory and swap space you have.
> Lots of both and you'll get very few hammer sessions, very little and
> they'll increase.
512 MB of memory and 1.5 GB of swap.
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 514528 509008 5520 0 196440 150124
-/+ buffers/cache: 162444 352084
Swap: 1493524 51344 1442180
It's some part of the GNOME desktop causing the activity, since disk
activity stops when I'm not logged in and starts when I log in, even
before any applications are started. But top doesn't show anything
useful -- any idea which GNOME component would be doing disk accesses
every 5 seconds or so?
Danny.
