Re: Disk access *every* 5 seconds?

[David P James <dpjames@home.com>]

On Tuesday 27 November 2001 13:04, Udo Burghardt wrote:
> Hello list,
>
> keeping uptodate with testing I am running KDE 2.2 since it is
> available without Problems. Thanks Ivan!
>
> My last update was yesterday. And now I have a periodical access to one
> harddisk (/usr) _exactly_ every 5 seconds. One can hear the heads
> moving two times with a delay of less than one second. This cycle
> repeats precisely every five seconds. Running xosview I can see the
> SCSI-Interrupt flashing once and the DISK activity states 69K for this
> cycle of measurement.
>
> This activity is new. And it is bad: it heats up the harddrive and more
> worse it crashes my system after some hours by freezing the system.
> I was able to log in via ssh but I was *not* able to execute a single
> command because that remote logon shell also freezes after hitting
> Enter without executing the command.
>
> I am posting this here to the kde-list because:
> * I am starting my machine in runlevel 2 without those noises
> * when I leave KDE the disk access stops
> * it does also happen with a fresh test user account without any KDE
> settings (no old .kde directory)
> * it does also happen when I start KDE as root (for the first time
> since a long time) to verify if it is permission related
> * it does *not* happen when I start fvwm95 instead of kde
>
>
> I have tried to find out which process is responsible
> * by ksysguard
> * by top in konsole and on a text console with KDE in the background
> withour success. There is simple no process with a significant Cpu
> usage. I have also tried to locate the trouble-maker by killing some
> processes randomly. That is not a good approach...
>
> Then I did lsof several times every ten seconds and looked for
> differences. No success.
>
> So my question is simply: how can I find out which process triggers
> disk activity every five seconds?
>
> System information:
> Kernel 2.4.14-k6,  AMD K6-III, 400MHz,
> 448 MB Ram, IDE-Burner via
> ide-scsi.
> The harddisk in question is a Seagate ST39140W on an Adaptec AHA2940.
> /usr mounted on /dev/sdc5, lof of space available, using reiserfs
>
I have no idea if this will actually work, but you could try disabling 
ide-scsi for your burner. It's a long shot, but given that the problem seems 
to be at least partially related to your scsi drive it couldn't hurt to try. 
If it doesn't work then you'll have eliminated one more possibility.
-- 
David P. James
Third Year Economics
Queen's University,
Kingston, Ontario
http://members.rogers.com/dpjames/

The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe.
-Dr. Leonard McCoy, Star Trek IV