Hard disk activity
 

Hello folks,
Some time I find that there is a lot of hard disk activity. And I am sure this is happenning with everybody. There is no problem in my opinion, becasue normally many house keeping activities would cause hard disk activity.
But can I somehow find out (in detail) as to what is causing this activity.

Thanks in advance.


Prabhat Soni

is a good start. Also check out the 'ps' command for more information.

There could well be something like "updatedb" running (that would update the (s)locate database, and is run once a day by default if I'm right), or something else that is run when the system finds out that you're not using it (resources free). Fedora systems run prelink (well, I could be 100% wrong with that process name, I don't use Fedora daily) or something like that at times, to speed up things, and it does it fairly often.

Thanks.

Ihad already checked "top" but it contained cpu loading. I was not able to find out the exact cause of hard disk activitity.

May be there are some other places to look into.


Prabhat Soni

Well chances are that whatever is on the top of your CPU load is whats causing the drive activity. Thats not always going to be the case but have a look, one of the top few will most likely be your culprit.

In detail this can be difficult. While the suggestions given so far have been really useful, one problem that has not been discussed so far is swapping. If you are using more memory than you have got (more virtual memory than your amount of RAM) then almost anything that you do will cause a flurry of swapping. You could then conclude that the last thing that you have done is disk intensive, when that is not really a good interpretation.

If you are using kde, the ksysguard tool is good as you can look at whether your ram is fully utilised with the same tool that you use to look at processes. You could even set it up to instrument the traffic into and out of partitions (although this gets hard to understand with intricate partition systems). Gnome has a similar tool, but I forget the name.

I've got one box that does more hard disk activity than I would like, but I know this is down to a dhcp error, leading to frequent writes to log files. So, another thing you might want to look at is whether you have any log files that are growing out of control.