Short hard disk accesses like a beating heart
The system has no errors (I know of) and runs as it should.
But I can hear that one hard disk is briefly accessed about 88 times / minute -- sounds like a quietly beating heart. "top" and "ps ax" don't show anything suspicious (for me, that is). I stopped "akonadi" and its helpers. "iostat" gives Quote:
How can I find out what is causing this and how to make it stop or finish faster if it is really needed? |
What are your mount options in /etc/fstab? If you mount with something like 'relatime' on all hard disks does that change things? Can you find which disk? Let's say it's sdX; What does
Code:
lsof |grep sdX |
iotop?
|
Interesting... Let us know! Yup, iotop is #1, from web-search: linux monitor disk activity
|
Sorry to be back so late.
I had to power down after my first post. Symptoms are gone for the moment, but they'll come back infrequently in my experience. I'll keep all of you advised :). Quote:
Code:
me@PC:~> cat /etc/fstab |
@Doug_G & @Jjanel I'll try "iotop" and keep you advised as soon as it is taking off again ;).
|
Whoa !!! - I'm a long-time btrfs user, but that is a seriously ummmm ... interesting config ... :p
In the past, things like desktop search tools running in the background have been a source of things like this. I also found firefox (and chrome) hitting .cache continually by running some kernel function tracing on ext4 for a while. Even moved .cache into tmpfs for a while to try and isolate the load. Never noticed anything on btrfs, so never attempted any tracing there. Will add it to my "to-do" list. |
Quote:
I recently built a replacement system (Mint 18) and noticed that after the installation you could hear a distinct "tick", "tick" from the disk for quite a while. It continued for a couple of days (My system isn't on permanently so maybe a couple of hours per session?), it finally stopped and hasn't done it since. My thoughts at the time were that it was due to having to create some sort of index file in the background, maybe to support journaling? Anyway, that's my :twocents: Play Bonny! :hattip: |
Quote:
Quote:
|
Quote:
No, this ("/") is my tumbleweed installation of quite some "age" -- about half a year possibly an entire year but frequently updated. /home is ancient -- 4 years? I really dunno. |
If you're still hunting for the disk, try this (as root)on each mechanical disk
Code:
lsof |grep sda Code:
bash-4.3$ sudo lsof |grep sda Code:
bash-4.3$ sudo cat /proc/61/io |grep write sda3=/proc/61=/, sda5=/proc/384=/home, & sda7=/proc/386=/mnt/virtual, where I have a few virtual machines to run odd bits of software. You will at least find what has the traffic. |
Thanks, business_kid I'll do that when it is misbehaving again (right now I'm not home). I will report then.
|
Quote:
Quote:
Much more easy to set up trace from userspace - hopefully some userland tools to expose the results will be in the pipeline soon as well. |
It's possible you just had a temp file that gets updated regularly, and it happened to get allocated to a spot on the disk that caused a long head seek each time it was accessed, then returning to the idle location. The actuator seeking a long distance would cause the kind of sound you described.
Then later, the temp file got reallocated to a location that doesn't need a lengthy seek, and the noise went away. If this were the case, you probably wouldn't see anything significant in iotop or any other disk activity reporting. |
Just to eliminate the possibility of a hardware problem, I recommend running the hard drive manufacturer's diagnostic utility in "thorough" mode. Download the Seatools for DOS here:
http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/ It's a bootable iso that you burn to a cd-r just like any linux installation cd. Boot with your cd-r and run the hard drive diagnostics on both of your Seagate hard drives from there(see Seagate SeaTools documentation). |
All times are GMT -5. The time now is 12:54 AM. |