[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: spindown no longer working after upgrade from etch -> lenny



On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 09:57:29PM +0100, Markus Ulbricht wrote:
> Hi all!
>
> Since hdd performance of the Thecus N2100 is not so
> perfect with debian etch (stable, kernel 2.6.18) I did
> an upgrade to lenny with kernel 2.6.26 including the
> DMA patches by Martin Michlmayr.
>
> Thanks to Martin the hard drive performance is now
> much better (173 MB/s  cached / 48 MB/s buffered reads).
>
> Unfortunately hdd spindown is no longer working.

Oooh, I've been here.  My problem turned out to be atime updating; I had a
process that was reading a file every 30 seconds or so, which then caused
the atime on that file to be updated and hence the disk was never spinning
down.  Remounting with noatime did the trick.

Assuming that isn't it, it's unlikely that you'll be running enough
processes to make finding the culprit by killing things one-by-one
impractical.

> Since I am not so familiar with kernel (re)compilation I am not able
> to create an appropriate kernel needed for tools like atop which is able
> to report  processes responsible for disk i/o.

Rebuilding a kernel isn't hard, but it does take a little while, so I'd go
with other investigation methods first.

- Matt


Reply to: