mysterious, hard drive intensive process after start up...

lumix · 03-27-2007, 09:56 AM

Hey all,

I have a fairly new and vanilla install of Etch on my laptop, and have chosen
JFS as the filesystem.

Not long after I boot up, say 2 minutes, some process will always start that provides no user interface whatsoever and works the hard drive pretty intensely for about 1-2 minutes.

Anyone know what this might be? A better question would be, how can I tell what process in general, at any given time, is tied to current disk activity (e.g. reads/writes, file opens, buffers, etc.)?

Thanks.

simcox1 · 03-27-2007, 12:01 PM

You can check what processes are running with the 'ps' command.

ps aux

will give you a list. That might help. Also the 'top' command (probably better) will help.

jschiwal · 03-27-2007, 12:12 PM

One possibility is the beagle daemon is indexing new files. Another is if a cron job checks if cron daily has been run in the last 24 hours and if not, starts it. That would run updatedb which would work the hard drive. Using ps and top as the previous poster recommended will tell you for sure.

lumix · 03-30-2007, 01:57 PM

How do I know which of the processes in either top or ps are associated with the the hdd activity? The CPU % in top isn't a good correlation with it; is one of the others more directly associated with media i/o?

Thanks.

reddazz · 03-30-2007, 02:32 PM

I suspect that activity is because of cron. What happens is that Linux schedules some automated tasks (e.g. updatedb and log rotation) to be run at certain times of the day and if the computer is switched off at that time, the jobs are run whenever the computer is started. This sometimes makes the computer a little bit slow for a few minutes after initial startup, but things get back to normal once the jobs have finished.