Disk access issue

[the mitzman]

So I'm very pleased with Ubuntu 7.04. Everything out of the box worked beyond my expectations. One thing I noticed though is that my harddrive led light is blinking every 3 seconds or so. In gkrellm, the disk monitor is showing disk access but I'm not sure how to pinpoint this. I know in XP this wasn't going on so I'm positive it's some running process. Can anyone help identify what it could be? What other information do you guys (and gals) need?

[X_console]

Try running top and ps aux See if there's something running.

[the mitzman]

Alright I'll give that a go when I get home tonight. It definitely seems odd but I'll come back and post the results this evening.

[the mitzman]

So I watched Top and here's what I see bouncing around the top spots:
Xorg
compiz.real
tray.py
daemon.py


Of those, daemon.py is for wicd and compiz.real isn't causing the problem (when compiz is not running it's still doing lots of disk access).


ps -aux isn't showing me too much that I'm concerned about.

[retsaw]

The disk access might just be caused by the system logger. Try turning off syslogd and see if that stops them.

[the mitzman]

Nope. Turned off syslogd and it didn't make a difference.

klogd was also running and I shut that down and it didn't make a difference :(

[E1PHOTON]

i would say compiz would be causing some disk access. Also, is gkrellm saying anything about swap space usage. that would cause disk reads.

[the mitzman]

I've disabled compiz before and it still happens (it even happens when I logout of my gnome session and sit in gdm). If I go into gkrellm and set it to show my individual disk partitions instead of just sda, then it shows this.

sda1 - my windows xp partition, no random writes
sda2 - my / partition, this is where the problem is
sda3 - swap partition

I'm at work so that's by memory but when I'm home later I'll verify and post back about that.

[bwkaz]

Does it help if you mount the root filesystem with the noatime option? That way, reading from files won't cause writes to the filesystem's "last access time" data, which in turn will prevent the writes from hitting the disk.

In order to actually do this, you may have to redo your distro's initramfs or initrd, or you may just have to modify /etc/fstab (add noatime to the options field on the root FS's line) and rerun mkinitrd/mkinitramfs/whatever. Depends on your distro's initramfs/initrd setup.

[the mitzman]

Does it help if you mount the root filesystem with the noatime option? That way, reading from files won't cause writes to the filesystem's "last access time" data, which in turn will prevent the writes from hitting the disk.

In order to actually do this, you may have to redo your distro's initramfs or initrd, or you may just have to modify /etc/fstab (add noatime to the options field on the root FS's line) and rerun mkinitrd/mkinitramfs/whatever. Depends on your distro's initramfs/initrd setup.



Well I did the above and no dice. Still getting these constant small writes to sda2. I put noatime on the fstab, rebuilt my initramfs (since it's ubuntu) and I still have the problem. The writes are spaced about ....

Ok as I was typing this, the problem stopped! Double-you-tee-eff??? Oh well. I'll keep my eye on things and report back on if it happens again.


EDIT: OH DEAR LORD I FOUND THE ANSWER!!!! It's Pidgin, it seems that it likes to write to the config files and whatnot. Shut down pidgin and the constant writes subside. How's that for sleuth work? Ah well

EDIT 2: I lied. Not Pidgin. It's Firefox. I left pidgin running and killed firefox and the problem goes away. So weird.