Re: How to track hard drive seeks?(more info/questions)

[servis@purdue.edu]

On 23 Feb, Lindsay Allen wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 20 Feb 1998 servis@purdue.edu wrote:
>> 
>> Is there some program that I can use to monitor what programs are
>> seeking the hard drive?  Some program, system call, or something is
>> causing a quick seek to my root partitions hard drive every second or
>> two.  I don't know what it is and I would like to find out.  My root
>> partition(everything except /home) is a 3.2G partition(/dev/hda5) on a
>> new WD 6.4G udma drive.  I have used "hdparm -d1 -c3 -S 241" on the
>> drive(/dev/hda) but disabling those options doesn't stop it. 
>> I don't recall this happening on the old drive that the root partition
>> used to be on, a WD 1.2G eide drive(now /home on /dev/hdb2).
>> 
> 
> Have a look at update.  On _one_ of my debian boxes it accesses the drive
> twice every five seconds and it is driving me up the wall.  The other
> boxes just sit here quietly. 
> 


Bingo! Now I am curious as why the change when I changed hard drives? 
My old drive is louder(when it seeks) than my new one so I would have
noticed it on it.  

I attached strace to the update process and it is doing as it says,
sleeps for 5 seconds and then calls bdflush(). I can't watch bdflush
because it is a new process everytime.  

Anybody else have any pointers to why the change in behavior. The
bdflush man page isn't very specific on how it works. Does bdflush
always flush to disk or only if there are dirty buffers?  Could the new
drive be confusing bdflush in some way?  

Thanks,


Brian 


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