Re: I am not impressed with Debian so far.
Patrick Colbeck wrote:
> Hey, my hard drive did the sudden thrashing thing last night too. Its
> never done it before (well it has in NT but not in Linux). All I was
> doing was reading mail remotely over a dialup line using xemacs in a
> kterm in KDE 1.1.1 (from snowcrash). It stopped after a while (about 4
> minutes) and has been fine since. This never happened before in RedHat
> or with Hamm. Is this a KDE thing perhaps ?. I am running on an AST M
> series Laptop which has 48Mb ram and a 2GB Linux partition with about
> 1300MB free and a 92MB swap file.
>
> Pat
It's probably just some scheduled housekeeping, such as an updatedb (which updates
the database used by the locate command). As root, you can run updatedb manually to
see if it "sounds/feels" comparable to what you experienced last night. Also, you can
run updatedb manually after you've installed some new package(s) if you need to
locate a file before the scheduled updatedb runs.
It may also be some other scheduled process, but on my machines the scheduled run of
updatedb is the usual cause of late-night thrashing.
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