On 1/16/07, John Bowden <john.bowden43@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 2007-01-17 at 10:14 +1100, David Timms wrote:
> Lonni J Friedman wrote:
> > On 1/16/07, Ambrogio <fn050202@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >> Il giorno lun, 15/01/2007 alle 12.53 -0800, Lonni J Friedman ha scritto:
> >> > Anyone else running VMWare workstation in FC6 (x86)? I've noticed
> >> > that whenever vmware is running (WinXP), the disk is getting polled
> >> > every other second non-stop. it sounds like little men are marching
> >> > around its so loud & annoying. Its not a memory/swap thing as I've
> >> > got 3GB of RAM, and vmware has access to a large chunk of it.
> >> Try also to monitor on Linux what appens.
> >> With top for examples, look at the swap area to see if it's used.
> >>
> >> With 3 GB of RAM and 2 assigned to vmware, maybe linux also swap.
> >
> > No, there's no swapping going on, I've already checked that. Plus
> > swap usage in linux shouldn't normally result in a regular pattern of
> > disk access.
> >
> >>
> >> Note also that if you have swap on Windows, the Windows kernel swap even
> >> if they don't need to do it :-)
> >
> > Windows has a swap file. I'm not sure what that would suggest with
> > respect to this problem thoiugh.
> Further to what Ambrogio said:
> Come to think of it: after a while, windows machine tends to get a lot
> of stuff in file cache, and drops some inactive {libraries} out to swap,
> if they haven't been used for a {while}. I have seen that on normal
> winxp usage (and you aren't touching the machine), sometimes it just
> writes stuff to the disk, then for like a minute you hear a little disk
> access every second or so.
>
> Though win warns you not to (even with GB of ram), you can set the swap
> to be disabled, in performance options. That should put that possibility
> to rest.
>
> If it's still warming your disk, perhaps see if there are any startup or
> run/runonce registry items that can be removed, along with system tray
> bits. Maybe forcibly do a win defrag {a fresh install is generally
> fragmented because the installer decompresses from cd to the hard drive
> and then installs from the hard drive to the hard drive :( }
>
> DaveT.
>
You will find that windoz will default to a swap file 1.5 times the real
RAM, and will swap things in and out on a regular basis. Its memory
management is still very crude compared to a nix o/s. As well as
indexing check to see if any anti virus or mallware cleaners are
running. Also if you have m$ office it also has an index service.
I've got no anti-virus or malware software installed (although this
does make me wonder if there's a virus at play, however this vmware
instance is behind a NAT'd firewall, and its the only Windows instance
behind the firewall, so it seems unlikely to be a virus). I also do
not have Office installed.
--
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L. Friedman netllama@xxxxxxxxx
LlamaLand http://netllama.linux-sxs.org
