Re: What's using my harddisk? or, how to silence my computer

[servis@purdue.edu]

*- Stefan Baums wrote about "What's using my harddisk? or, how to silence my computer"
> Hi all!
> 
> I'm using Debian (the most recent packages) on a laptop with a pretty
> noisy harddisk (a Toshiba harddisk inside an HP Omnibook), and I'm
> sick to death of hearing it all the time I'm using my computer (and, of
> course, it's draining the battery as well). So I set my harddisk timeout
> to 30 seconds. But _something_ keeps accessing the disk. I tried strace
> on the most obvious candidates (xemacs, gnome-panel), but could not
> find the guilty program.
> 
> Any suggestions anyone on how to monitor harddisk access on my
> computer? There must be a way to at least write a text on it without
> constant disk access (autosave concerns aside).
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> Stefan

I have noticed this as well.  Something is causing dirty buffers and
causing update to flush the buffers to disk with bdflush about every 30
seconds or so.  Do a 'ps ax' and look for the pid of update then give
that pid to strace, 'strace -p <pid of update>',  and notice the
correlation between the disk activity and the activity of the strace
output.  I tried to trace it down and couldn't find the source.  If you
find anything let me know.

ps. go to sleep it is 4 in morning in the UK!(unless of course you work
nights then that would not be a good thing)

-- 
Brian 
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Mechanical Engineering                              servis@purdue.edu
Purdue University                   http://www.ecn.purdue.edu/~servis
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