Re: strange disk access

On Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 05:22:55PM -0400, BTP wrote:
> Hello, I hope maybe one of you can point me in the right direction to do my
> research here...
>
> on my debian system (on my laptop) for the first time and for no reason my
> disk accesses started going crazy and really bogging down the system for
> about half a minute. I couldn't even open a terminal window to check the
> process tasks...
>
> How would I go about tracking down exactly what this disk access was all
> about? It might have been just swapping but I don't know if it would get
> that bad and whether it normally swaps without such problems...
>
> Bart

Hi Bart,

my first guess is a cron job. So I'd look in the /etc/cron.* directories
(if I knew the time of the disk access). Also in 1.5 minutes, there is
plenty of time to start 'top' or 'ps' to see the processes acting up.
And finally there is 'atop', which records the running processes. CPU
usage etc for later perusal. So you can just let it run and examine what
happened later.

Hth
--
Andreas Rippl -- GPG messages preferred
Key-ID: 0x81073379

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