what's my machine is doing?
 

I use RH7.1 on PII. Whenever I login into Linux, the harddisk seems to moving for almost half an hour as if some resource-intensive operation is going on. The user interface actions like moving the mouse and input from keyboard appear after some time after they have been done. What the hell my machine is doing all that time?? that too for half an hour??

I'd check your logs and the output of dmesg for any clues as to what process is tying up the system.

- You can't do anything (no mouse or kybd) during that period of activity?
- Has it always done this, or is this a new problem?
-Does it do it when booting into any runlevel, or just a certain one?

how to do that?/
 

Hello DMR,
I'm a :newbie: . so pls tell me in details how to check logs etc. I even don't know where they are located.??

What speed is your processor and how much RAM do you have? I have had problems in the past using the GUI when I didn't have enough memory. I had one particular problem when I was running Gnome/KDE and StarOffice.

Ryan

Re: how to do that?/
 

Logs are, for the most part, located in /var/log. The "messages" file that I refered to definitely lives there, and there are others as well. To view their contents, type "less /var/log/name of log file". The less commmand will allow you to scroll back anc forth through the documents using the up/down arrows keys or the pg up/pg down keys.
To review the messages that scroll by during boot up for possible clues, type "less dmesg". Do both of these as root.

Could you answer the questions I asked as well, please? The information could be helpful. When I ask about a "runlevel", I'm basically asking if it does this only when you boot directly into the GUI (runlevel 5 in Rehat), or if it also happens if you boot a shell/command prompt (runlevel 3). I'm assuming that your system is set up to boot directly into X (the GUI), yes?

Also, ryandelany brings up a good question. How much RAM do you have, and how large are your hard drive and swap file/partition? I doubt that these would cause pauses of the length you describe, but...

My Machine
 

I have PII-300MMX with 128MB RAM and 133MB swap partition. I log in to GUI directly.

Interestingly i could not see the desktop icons for root login. there are there in desktop directory but are not displayed on screen. all things goes slow after login and machine seems to be doing something else than what i told it to do:(

One other thing that may be of iterest:

On my system I have the locate database (used for the locate command, try it out) update every night. This is done automatically by the system via the updatedb program and a few others.

The long and the short of it is:
There is a chance it may be running updatedb if it didnt get to run it when it wanted to. An easy way to check, while you see the increased disk activity, type:

ps aux | grep updatedb

If you see a process listed, then its running : )
This is often set up automatically by today's distros.

Hope this helps,

good luck!

Tom

what next??
 

yes, updatedb is running.
now what next ???

On some distros, updatedb is run daily, per cron.daily. You can make it run weekly or monthy or not at all. You can do it manually whenever you feel you need to. Look at the cron man page, and look at the cron entries in /etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.weekly, etc...

If you stilll have questions, write again.

cheers,
wil snyder

Another thing you might want to check in the log: /var/log/messages is something about USB cable down something or another, one right after another. On one of my machines, a compaq presario, The first thing i do after installing redhat 7.1/7.2 is to delete the alias usb line in /etc/modules.conf. If I dont, the log files get huge with entries about usb cable connection problems, and the hard drive is constantlly writing. I dont use usb on it anyway, its my webserver.