Re: tracing disk accesses
Douglas Bates <bates@stat.wisc.edu> writes:
> My laptop running Debian 2.0 seems to be making fairly regular
> accesses to the hard drive - every 15-20 seconds I would say, even
> when there is no user-initiated activity but I do have an X server
> running and am logged in.
>
> Can someone suggest a convenient way to check what programs may be
> accessing the disk? The system has 128 Mb of memory and it is not
> swapping at all.
Check you syslogs. By default syslogd fsyncs any files after writing a log
entry. Try adding a - before any filenames in /etc/syslog.conf to turn that
off.
Otherwise just look at the %CPU in ps or top, usually a process that's
spinning, even if it's not cpu-bound will show up with a non-zero cpu usage.
Then strace -p <pid> that process and see what it's trying to do.
Also, it could just be the normal asynchronous page flushing. You can try
running the modified "laptop" bdflush that stops flushing buffers when the
machine is idle for a while.
greg
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