Hi there,

More of a question than a problem really...

I have Redhat 9 installed, as does my friend, and at random times, the hard disc seems to go mad, and the hd light flashes like mad on our computers.

I have guessed that it is some form of disk cleanup, and that its nothing to worry about.


Is this normal? What is it doing?

Thanks!!

Could be something to do with swap although it's more rare than in windows. Run top and check what processes are running and what the memory/swap is doing at the time of this hard disc thrashing.

could it be cron running updatedb?

I'd lay bets on updatedb... I had my RH9 running the HD like mad once, and I actually saw it... Then I found it was updatedb. That's how I found out about locate, a very helpful command .

I can say for sure it's updatedb. If you go into a term and as root type:

# updatedb

Your hard drive will do the same thing. On my system, by default, it's scheduled to run about once a day. Doesn't hurt anything. In fact, if you just added some files or deleted files or added an app and did a "whereis" on it or "locate" and couldn't find it, do an "updatedb" and repeat the locate comand and it'll be there.

I don't mind the hard drive activity just to keep the database fresh. It also depends on how many files you have on your system how long it'll take to finish, it seems.

Thanks for your time. At least I know there is nothing wrong now