On Tue, Oct 05, 2004 at 01:02:13PM +1000, Danny Yee wrote:
> 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?
Five seconds.... that sounds like a magic number.
# grep -i seconds /var/log/dmesg
kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds
kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds
kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds
So, file meta data activity of any type will generate some IO.
lets see if there are interesting numbers of bytes involved.
# sar -d 5 5
Linux 2.6.8-1.521 (thisbox.fom) 10/07/2004
09:10:59 AM DEV tps rd_sec/s wr_sec/s
.... snip lots of zeros..
09:11:04 AM dev1-15 0.00 0.00 0.00
09:11:04 AM dev3-0 1.60 1.60 38.32
09:11:04 AM dev3-64 1.00 25.55 4.79
09:11:04 AM dev22-0 0.00 0.00 0.00
.... snip lots of zeros..
--
T o m M i t c h e l l
Me, I would "Rather" Not.
