Whats going on to my linux hard drive?

alaios · 09-21-2006, 04:35 AM

Hello to everyone..last night i have noticed that my hard drive was working like crazy...at the very beggining i have been thinking that my computer it has just cracshed (I couldnt move mouse.... or use the keyboard) ... i have left the pc idle for 10 minuts and it was possible for me to use it again... But what was running to hard disk and made my computer so slow? Do u know any command that can reveal what programmes use my hard disk?

Using top i have found a process called process-metadata that was consuming enough cpu process... Is it possible to know which programmes use which processes?

trickykid · 09-21-2006, 05:59 AM

Was it real late? Perhaps it was a nightly cron job? I'd start by looking there.

alaios · 09-21-2006, 09:43 AM

No it wasnt... This morning happened again 2.. I think there is a command that can reveals which programmes are writign to hard disk

trickykid · 09-21-2006, 10:17 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by alaios

No it wasnt... This morning happened again 2.. I think there is a command that can reveals which programmes are writign to hard disk

What programs are running at that given time? What cron jobs are set at the time it occured? Was it the same time as before? Narrow your list down but I don't know of any commands to see what program is writing to disk, top or ps can list the processes in use, memory and cpu %, etc.

Tomasu · 09-21-2006, 10:25 AM

I'm betting its just updatedb running to index your drive for "locate" and/or "rlocate".

Handy tool that locate, if you use it. And yes, its run from a cronjob.

alaios · 09-29-2006, 08:44 AM

Every time my computer starts, the hard disk is working all the time... During this period i cant even use my computer the mouse is not moving even the number lock needs about 20 secs to turn off :P
I want to know why is this happening
If the problem was occured by updatedb it wouldnt be happening each time i turn on my linux.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tomasu

I'm betting its just updatedb running to index your drive for "locate" and/or "rlocate".

Handy tool that locate, if you use it. And yes, its run from a cronjob.

ethics · 09-29-2006, 08:47 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by trickykid

What programs are running at that given time? What cron jobs are set at the time it occured? Was it the same time as before? Narrow your list down

That's a good place to start, you can then whittle down the possibilities, right now it could be anything from cron jobs to hardware failure, with quite a bit in between

theNbomr · 09-29-2006, 10:11 AM

When the problem occurs, run top. There is a decent chance that whatever is doing that much disk IO is also using a fair bit of CPU. See what the top CPU user is.

Could also be the kernel managing swap space. Do you have enough RAM?

--- rod.

trickykid · 09-29-2006, 08:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by alaios

Every time my computer starts, the hard disk is working all the time... During this period i cant even use my computer the mouse is not moving even the number lock needs about 20 secs to turn off :P
I want to know why is this happening
If the problem was occured by updatedb it wouldnt be happening each time i turn on my linux.

Check your startup scripts. This can also be caused by ldconfig running, updatedb, etc. It's your machine and your in control, find out what's starting up and narrow it down.

alaios · 09-30-2006, 05:51 PM

Ok i ll try to rexplain the whole problem as good as i can
Firstly check my process list

Code:

top - 01:25:44 up 11 min,  3 users,  load average: 11.01, 6.86, 3.64
Tasks: 109 total,   2 running, 107 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 45.8% us,  7.6% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.0% id, 45.8% wa,  0.7% hi,  0.0% si
Mem:   1036588k total,  1021672k used,    14916k free,     9800k buffers
Swap:  1718912k total,  1445560k used,   273352k free,    35212k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 3076 root      16   0 73380 7696 1904 D 24.6  0.7   1:42.59 X
 4048 alaios    15   0  133m  29m  15m S 17.6  2.9   0:18.39 firefox-bin
 4130 alaios    18   0 2044m 791m 1896 D  7.0 78.2   0:09.15 mplayer
 4004 root      18   0  122m  38m 2232 D  2.0  3.8   1:21.32 parse-metadata
  121 root      15   0     0    0    0 D  1.3  0.0   0:01.65 kswapd0
 3084 root      34  19 73012 4380 2064 S  0.3  0.4   0:23.56 zmd
 3601 alaios    15   0 41272 5416 5008 D  0.3  0.5   0:01.90 kopete
 4209 root      16   0  2188 1024  760 R  0.3  0.1   0:00.10 top
 4004 root      18   0  122m  42m 2476 R  0.3  4.2   1:21.23 parse-metadata
    1 root      16   0   720   56   28 S  0.0  0.0   0:01.35 init

I can only blame mplayer (i dont know why this process exists!!! In the kde i cant see nowhere any mplayer programme. Also i dont know how to disable that process so doesnt start ...

I also can blame the parse-metadata process.. But i dont know which programme creates that process. Also i cant kill it killall parse-metadata or kill -9 process_id does nothing.

Before decidint to write this post i have switched on my computer and boot to linux. I have worked about 10 minutes (reading emails and surfing) when hard disk started working heavily. During that period i couldnt move mouse orswitch off or on the number lock. Whjen i was typing this post same problem reaapeared hard disk was working heavily and i have had to wait about more 15 minutes till i could be able to do type more text here.
Id dont know what to blame
a)perhaps a process writes all the time to the hard disk ( i know there is a command that shows the opened files to the system)
b)Perhas i am facing a hardware failure and i dont know what will solve it
b1)run checkdisk (give me plz commands and some basic orders)
b2)the hard disk is only suitable for recycling :P When i start pc grubs needs about 20 secs to show the menu. the hard disk during this period i loading. When i was writing b2 i couldnt see the text and iave had to wait about 40secs to see it

beagle2 · 09-30-2006, 06:17 PM

Don't see what distro you are using but if it's suse then your problem could be zdm - see this for more info on how to turn it off and use smart instead http://forums.suselinuxsupport.de/lo...hp/t37365.html

haertig · 09-30-2006, 07:20 PM

I'd say mplayer is eating up all your memory and forcing the system to swap. This would make your harddrive grind like a crazed blender, and your system would slow to a crawl. In your "top" output, this first line on the right shows your one minute load average to be 11.01. That's pretty bad for a single CPU machine. Terrible actually. Notice also that "top" is showing your CPU at 0% idle. That goes along with your high load average. Also note on that same line "45.8% wa". That means about half the time your system is waiting on IO (to your harddisk). I'll bet it was grinding away like crazy when you ran this top.

---

If you can catch the problem happening again, run the command "vmstat 3". This will give you a memory usage picture every 3 seconds. You'll need to hit ctrl-c to abort vmstat when you're through looking. Of specific importance to you are the colums under the heading "swap", individually labeled "si" and "so" (for "swap in" and "swap out"). Ideally these should be very low numbers, optimally zeros.

You can also run "vmstat -s" to get a summary since some point in the past (your last reboot?). Near the bottom of it's display is "pages swapped in" and "pages swapped out". These probably won't be zeros, but they shouldn't be huge numbers on a healthy system.

My guess would be that if you killed mplayer, your system would bounce back to a healthier state.

Compare your top output to mine (load average, %idle, Swap-used, etc.):

Code:

top - 18:18:13 up 13 days,  1:44,  2 users,  load average: 0.25, 0.37, 0.41
Tasks: 120 total,   1 running, 119 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  1.0% us,  0.0% sy,  0.0% ni, 98.7% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.3% si
Mem:   1036516k total,   846992k used,   189524k free,   125084k buffers
Swap:   514040k total,      180k used,   513860k free,   245688k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 8207 root      15   0  200m  66m 8652 S  1.0  6.5  80:31.22 Xorg
10660 david     16   0  2260 1140  848 R  0.3  0.1   0:00.01 top
    1 root      16   0  1960  668  560 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.78 init
    2 root      34  19     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:23.79 ksoftirqd/0
    3 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.02 watchdog/0
    4 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.82 events/0
    5 root      18  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.01 khelper
    6 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthread
    8 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kacpid
  138 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:04.74 kblockd/0
  166 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.07 pdflush
  167 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:01.61 pdflush
  169 root      11  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 aio/0
  168 root      16   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:21.77 kswapd0
  756 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.01 kseriod
  824 root      11  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 ata/0
  828 root      11  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 scsi_eh_0

alaios · 10-01-2006, 03:29 AM

but how mplayer starts? I have just installed a simple rpm package

., Ok i ll remove zmd-novell services :P:P
How can i install smart.. is it possible to do upgrades with smart?
Why suse 10.1 released a so beta version

trickykid · 10-01-2006, 09:17 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by alaios

but how mplayer starts? I have just installed a simple rpm package

., Ok i ll remove zmd-novell services :P:P
How can i install smart.. is it possible to do upgrades with smart?
Why suse 10.1 released a so beta version

Perhaps it's installed as a plugin for Firefox or another browser and it's loading that way. Mplayer doesn't usually just startup until it's asked to, like as if you loaded a webpage that has embedded video, etc.

haertig · 10-01-2006, 01:44 PM

You could try ps -e f | pg and scroll down the resulting output until you can see what process spawned mplayer. (Note: there is a space between the -e and the f in the ps command, ps -ef is not the same as ps -e f)