Re: Mysterious disk activity
On Sun, Jan 26, 2003 at 01:58:04AM +0000, Pigeon wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I get these occasional very long bursts of disk activity, usually but
> not always within an hour or so of booting up, during which the HD LED is
> on continuously and the machine is very slow to respond. There were
> cron jobs running global finds, which I knocked out; this helped, but
Yes, that's for the locate command. You can use "locate filename", and
it will quickly (i.e. within two seconds, if you have less than a couple
of million files unlike us....) show you where files live that have
that name.
> didn't stop it entirely. To make it more mysterious, ps ax during such
> a burst shows nothing untoward:
If the "knock them out" is by hand, then you will have let "find" run
for a couple of seconds. A little later, your system will decide that
"find" accessed a bunch of directories, and will write hte "last access"
time on those directories back to disk. That would explain the disk IO
burst.
Note that "load" does not always correspond to CPU usage: The system
will count processes waiting for disk IO towards the load as well.
This represents the "slowness" that lots of disk IO causes you to
feel.
The updatedb (that find running for locate) will run from the dayly
cron jobs. There might be a bunch of other things that are considered
useful to run every day.
Oh, most systems (I haven't checked debian) will move the "dayly" jobs
to the middle of the night if you leave your system running....
Roger.
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