On Mon, Jan 27, 2003 at 10:03:05AM +0100, Rogier Wolff wrote: > 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. AARGH! And there was me using 'find dir -name x' and hoping 'dir' didn't have to be /...
> > 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. AH. That probably DOES explain it, and why nothing shows up in ps ax at the time. Thanks! > 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. Yeah. That's why a nice SCSI drive is the next thing on my get-this-hardware list! > 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.... No, I switch it off when I'm not using it. I sleep in the same room and 4 fans and 6 disk drives make a lot of noise... Also the power consumption, and resulting temperature rise in the room, are non-negligible. Pigeon -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
