harddrive doing a lot of writing

[flynnwallace]

I have read on this before but dont remember from where. After login my harddrive starts to do a lot of writing and I dont know why. This just started recently. I vaguely remember why this happens and I want to find what I can do about this.

Flynn

[demian]

It might be a feature, not a bug...
Most distros set up some basic admin scripts that are run regularly via crond eg cleaning /tmp and stuff. Often they use elaborate find commands that take a while to complete.
Try to run top when your drive is going crazy again and see if there are some tasks run by users like nobody that might be causing this. Or just check your /etc/cron* entries.

[camelrider]

To enlarge... If this only last a few minutes (Mine spends several at midnight updating slocate, etc., and does some other stuff every ten minutes) then it's probably anacron. It runs cron jobs that got missed while the machine was shut down. I usually just keep mine on and shut off the monitor if I'm going to be gone long, but I take a break at midnight as slocate -u or updatedb, whichever it runs bogs my little system down for several minutes.

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We'll get thisright yet!

[flynnwallace]

thanks all for the help. I did command top and found that it was slocate that was doing all the writing. It does it at every startup so now I'm gonna see if I can stop that and make it update once a week.

Flynn