[Discuss] How can you tell which application exercises the disk a
lot?
Alan W. Irwin
irwin at beluga.phys.uvic.ca
Sat Nov 3 16:57:16 PDT 2007
On 2007-11-03 12:57-0700 R. Langkamer wrote:
> On 11/3/07 12:49 PM, Alan W. Irwin wrote:
>
>> I installed the kde package on my new box, and since then I notice that
>> the
>> disk light goes on every 2 seconds or so. I am trying to track down which
>> (KDE) application is doing it so I can uninstall that package if possible.
>> I have never seen that behaviour from KDE before, but then I am usually
>> much
>> more selective about what I install from KDE, and I now regret the
>> "shortcut" of installing the "kde" Debian package that sucks in most kde
>> applications.
>>
>> "ps auxww" tells me there are many applications starting with a "k" that
>> are
>> now running even though I don't have any KDE desktops actually running at
>> the time. Is there some equivalent to "top" for disk usage so I can find
>> which of those KDE applications are the culprit?
>>
>> Thanks in advance.
>>
>> Alan
>
>
> The first thing that comes to mind is the Linux version of Spotlight.
> If I recall correctly, it is called Beagle.
> The second thing I can think of is to start lsof or something similar
> and track down what is being accessed. Granted lsof is probably not ideal,
> but hopefully it gives you an nudge in the right direction. :)
Thanks for that help, but further investigation showed I probably asked the
wrong question unless you cannot trust the results of vmstat. Here are the
results from vmstat 5
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu----
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa
0 0 0 1895312 37004 65684 0 0 2 2 132 21 0 0 100 0
0 0 0 1895304 37004 65684 0 0 0 0 264 46 0 0 100 0
0 0 0 1895304 37012 65684 0 0 0 6 260 39 0 0 100 0
0 0 0 1895304 37020 65684 0 0 0 4 265 46 0 0 100 0
0 0 0 1895304 37020 65684 0 0 0 0 259 34 0 0 100 0
0 0 0 1895304 37020 65684 0 0 0 0 264 45 0 0 100 0
0 0 0 1895304 37020 65684 0 0 0 1 260 34 0 0 100 0
0 0 0 1895304 37020 65684 0 0 0 5 265 45 0 0 100 0
0 0 0 1895304 37020 65684 0 0 0 0 260 34 0 0 100 0
0 0 0 1895304 37020 65684 0 0 0 0 264 44 0 0 100 0
0 0 0 1895304 37024 65684 0 0 0 1 260 34 0 0 100 0
0 0 0 1895304 37024 65684 0 0 0 0 264 44 0 0 100 0
0 0 0 1895304 37024 65684 0 0 0 0 260 33 0 0 100 0
0 0 0 1895304 37024 65684 0 0 0 0 265 44 0 0 100 0
0 0 0 1895304 37024 65684 0 0 0 0 259 36 0 0 100 0
0 0 0 1895304 37032 65684 0 0 0 2 265 45 0 0 100 0
0 0 0 1895304 37032 65684 0 0 0 0 260 34 0 0 100 0
0 0 0 1895304 37032 65684 0 0 0 0 264 44 0 0 100 0
0 0 0 1895304 37032 65684 0 0 0 0 259 33 0 0 100 0
0 0 0 1895304 37032 65684 0 0 0 0 264 44 0 0 100 0
0 0 0 1895304 37032 65684 0 0 0 0 259 34 0 0 100 0
0 0 0 1895304 37032 65684 0 0 0 0 264 44 0 0 100 0
0 0 0 1895304 37032 65684 0 0 0 1 260 34 0 0 100 0
0 0 0 1895304 37032 65684 0 0 0 0 264 44 0 0 100 0
This is for an idle system with only root logged in to a Linux console and
clearly there are many 5 second intervals when there is no reading or
writing to/from disks. I also tried "iostat -d 2" which creates a log every
two seconds of all on-going disk activity similar to above, and the vast
majority of the two second intervals had no disk activity reported.
However, during both these tests the "disk" light went on every two seconds
like a metronome. So one question is what lights up that light other than
disk activity? For recent kernels (I have 2.6.22) could there be some SATA
controller sensing activity going on every two seconds that doesn't actually
end up in an actual read or write to disk? The motherboard manual says it
has HDD activity leads and power leads for LED indicators, and I am
virtually positive that is what is hooked up with the case LED's that have a
power symbol and disk symbol next to them. Of course "HDD activity" could
mean sensing activity rather than read/write, and its possible there is a
KDE application that is sensing S.M.A.R.T. Disk information every two
seconds, but I haven't found any app like that yet.
Has anybody else here experienced the disk light for their Linux box
going on every two seconds? That does not happen for my two older boxes.
Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin
Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).
Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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