Re: which process is writing to disk?
Lubos Vrbka wrote:
hi guys,
i sometimes see the following happenning on my notebook. every few
seconds, i can hear a tick from the harddrive. it seems, that some
process writes just a little bit to disk and the heads are immediately
parked. the sound is quite annoying. it doesn't happen all the time,
just sometimes.
for example today. memory almost free, swap completely free, small load,
psi, thunderbird and opera running.
do you have any idea what could be causing this? or is there any way to
see which processes are accessing the disk in every moment?
thank you in advance for your help. regards,
I suspect it has to do with cleaning up dirty pages, probably by the kernel
deamon pdflush. Demand paged OS's like Linux require periodic writeback of
dirty (updated) pages of cached files. This is analogous to writeback of dirty
cache lines from the CPU. If this turns out to be your problem, it may be
possible to reconfigure the frequency of writebacks or switch to writethrough
mode, but I don't know if either option is possible or user-configurable in
recent kernels. If you execute the command "ls /proc/sys/vm" you will see
various paging settings, which may lead to some solutions. One setting called
"laptop_mode" may be of interest to you. A more developer-oriented Debian list,
or the kernel list may be a better place to ask this question.
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