Re: Hard drive spindown

From: Tom *** (me_at_privacy.net)
Date: 07/20/04

  • Next message: Dennis J. Tuchler: "SuSE 9.1 on Inspiron 4100???" 
    Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2004 14:33:44 +0000

    On 18/07/04 09:41, Robert E A Harvey wrote:
    > I'd certainly run lsof - you may need to install it - and see what the
    > file system thinks is going on.

    Many thanks for your suggestions and sorry for the delay in replying.

    I have installed lsof but to be honest I'm not too sure what to do
    with it.. (I probably should have put [newbie] in the subject
    line..) Running it without parameters brings up a ridiculous
    amount of entries so I'm not quite sure where to start.

    > And running a system monitor to see file system and swap accesses
    > going on.

    All I've got as far as I know is the gnome system monitor. This
    shows the swap file is not being used at all - with the machine
    idling it shows "used memory" 335Mb of 377Mb, which goes up
    slightly when I startup a few applications. The "used swap"
    remains at 0 bytes pretty much all the time, unless I start up
    *loads* of applications at the same time (which I never do anyway)
    - by opening Mozilla, Openoffice, Konqueror, Realplayer, K3b,
    Totem and Gimp all at the same time I have got it to display used
    swap of 180kb..

    Also, when the hard drive spins up again there is a short burst of
    100% CPU usage, if that means anything to you.

    > Are you running a MTA? Is your mail system testing a local pop3
    > mailbox every minute or something?

    No and no. ;)

    > Hve you tried an ls -ltR ~ to see what the most recently 'touched'
    > file in your home tree is? Then in /var/log or /var/spool?

    Doing an ls -ltR on /home or /var does not seem to give any clues
    (I left the machine idle for an hour then ran it, and could not
    find anything touched within the previous hour). However, running
    it on / (which took absolutely ages..) brought up a few suspects:
    lots of stuff in /proc (too much to list), /tmp/kde-tom,
    /home/tom/tmp/orbit-tom and /etc/cups/certs (??)

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