Thx Ed. I check out all the messages in the threads for the links you sent. One message stated clearly: "Well, turns out the interchange service was causing constant i/o. I stop it and the hard drives quit accessing every five seconds. Ext3 is _not_ the culprit." The message was from 2001. I googled for "linux interchange stop", but I did not see anything that gave me clear instructions on stopping this process. Maybe there is a script somewhere that needs to be altered? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Mike --- Ed Hill <ed@xxxxxxx> wrote: > On Thu, 2006-05-04 at 09:21 -0700, Mike Duffy wrote: > > Can anyone please explain to me why my hard drive continuously cycles every three to five > seconds, > > even when I am not doing anything? This is incredibly annoying. > > > > I am using FC-4. Does anyone know if this bug (please don't tell me it is a feature) has been > > fixed in FC-5? Does anyone know if there are any other Linux distributions that do not have > this > > bug? > > > > Is there any way to turn this activity off, by killing a process, etc.? If anyone can help me > > solve this I promise to buy you your favorite beverage if you are ever in Austin. > > Hi Mike, > > If you google for ext3 and "5 seconds" you'll see that there are a > number of things going on behind the scenes and one of them is a > 5-second commit interval for ext3. You can set a longer commit interval > but that doesn't solve the root cause which is one or more programs that > keep writing (potentially very small bits of information) to the disk > even when the system is supposedly quiescent. > > See the thread at: > > https://www.redhat.com/archives/roswell-list/2001-October/msg00060.html > https://www.redhat.com/archives/roswell-list/2001-October/msg00061.html > > and try google for more details. > > Ed > > -- > Edward H. Hill III, PhD > office: MIT Dept. of EAPS 54-1424; 77 Massachusetts Ave. > Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 > emails: eh3@xxxxxxx ed@xxxxxxx > URLs: http://web.mit.edu/eh3/ http://eh3.com/ > phone: 617-253-0098 > fax: 617-253-4464 > > > -- > fedora-list mailing list > fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx > To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list > __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com