Public bug reported: I've been trying to figure out why my HDD keeps on flushing metadata out every minute on an idle laptop and discovered that gsd-color opens /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London on my machine at regular intervals. This causes the access time (atime) to be updated causing a metadata flush afterwards. On an idle laptop this makes the HDD spin up, write data and then spin down again. This consumes power.
Can this periodic open/closing be fixed or at least try to use O_NOATIME on the opening to reduce the metadata atime updates? I diagnosed this by running: sudo fnotifystat -v -x/sys,/proc,/home one can see that the gsd-color is opening and closing the file. Looking deeper, I used health-check on gsd-color to gather the attached activity log of 5 minutes of activity of gsd-color on the idle machine. To capture the activity I used: sudo health-check -p gsd-color -d 300 -f -r -v > gnome-gsd-color- 5min.log I'm pretty sure that opening the zoneinfo file with O_NOATIME will avoid the metadata atime flushes and because the data has not changed on disk it should avoid the HDD spinup/spindown cycling. Alternatively, can the regular zoneinfo reads be avoided to save power? This seems like an identical bug as: https://launchpad.net/bugs/1846768 ** Affects: gnome-settings-daemon (Ubuntu) Importance: High Status: New ** Attachment added: "capture of gnome-gsd-color activity using heath-check tool" https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1846771/+attachment/5294348/+files/gnome-gsd-color-5min.log ** Changed in: gnome-settings-daemon (Ubuntu) Importance: Undecided => High ** Description changed: I've been trying to figure out why my HDD keeps on flushing metadata out - every minute on an idle laptop and discovered that gnome-gsd-color opens + every minute on an idle laptop and discovered that gsd-color opens /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London on my machine at regular intervals. This causes the access time (atime) to be updated causing a metadata flush afterwards. On an idle laptop this makes the HDD spin up, write data and then spin down again. This consumes power. Can this periodic open/closing be fixed or at least try to use O_NOATIME on the opening to reduce the metadata atime updates? I diagnosed this by running: sudo fnotifystat -v -x/sys,/proc,/home - one can see that the gnome-settings-daemon is opening and closing the - file. + one can see that the gsd-color is opening and closing the file. - Looking deeper, I used health-check on gnome-gsd-color to gather the - attached activity log of 5 minutes of activity of gnome-gsd-color on the - idle machine. + Looking deeper, I used health-check on gsd-color to gather the attached + activity log of 5 minutes of activity of gsd-color on the idle machine. To capture the activity I used: - sudo health-check -p gnome-gsd-color -d 300 -f -r -v > gnome-gsd-color- + sudo health-check -p gsd-color -d 300 -f -r -v > gnome-gsd-color- 5min.log I'm pretty sure that opening the zoneinfo file with O_NOATIME will avoid the metadata atime flushes and because the data has not changed on disk it should avoid the HDD spinup/spindown cycling. Alternatively, can the regular zoneinfo reads be avoided to save power? This seems like an identical bug as: https://launchpad.net/bugs/1846768 -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Desktop Bugs, which is subscribed to gnome-settings-daemon in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1846771 Title: gnome-settings-daemon opens /usr/share/zoneinfo/* every 30 seconds or so To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-settings-daemon/+bug/1846771/+subscriptions -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs
