My hard drive is randomly on full blast and the CPU at 50% usage...???

trusktr · 2010-10-02 18:08:28

Out of the blue all of a sudden my hard drive goes to work at full capacity and the CPU is at 50% usage. iotop shows nothing. I close Chromium, Gedit, and my Terminal and the hard drive continues for a minute on full blast.

I hate when the computer does these things without my approval. What's going on here?

litemotiv · 2010-10-02 18:12:30

Which DE, daemons and cronjobs do you have? Could be something like updatedb running, or strigi if you have that installed.

Pretty likely it's something that you (maybe indirectly) gave approval.

egan · 2010-10-02 19:19:34

Many packages actually install cron jobs, so if cron is running they are running. I never knew this until I was exploring the /etc filesystem. Things like updating the locate cache and man page cache are in there, both of which are CPU and disk intensive.

ewaller · 2010-10-02 19:53:55

trusktr wrote:

...my hard drive goes to work at full capacity and the CPU is at 50% usage. iotop shows nothing. ...

I would be concerned that iotop does not reveal the active process. Did you check your logs for I/O errors? It could be a kernel process trying desperately to read data from a bad sector. :-(

trusktr · 2010-10-08 19:06:45

@ewaller: Exactly! iotop *should* show something but it doesn't. If it happens again, I'll have a look at the logs. Which logs should I look in?

@litemotiv and egan: Yeah, i know updatedb does this sometimes, but in this case it lasted much much longer and updatedb didn't show up in iotop like it normally does. Also, i've kept a very very detailed log of every single thing i've installed or which settings I've modified. This incident has only happened a few times so I don't think it's a package or a cronjob. I don't think i have any cron jobs except for one. Last time it happened randomly hours into my session.

I use Gnome. DAEMONS=(syslog-ng dbus hal networkmanager !network netfs alsa !avahi-daemon @crond)

A bad sector seems like a possibility!

Last edited by trusktr (2010-10-08 19:08:31)

combuster · 2010-10-08 19:23:28

Install smartmon-tools and check it out with smartctl -a /dev/sdX to be sure (if your hd supports SMART, i guess that you have a computer that is less than a decade old )

trusktr · 2010-10-09 04:06:55

That's a neat tool! Would you be able to tell me briefly what these results mean (if there's anything bad)?

Those "old age" and "pre-failure" types aren't bad, right?

Last edited by trusktr (2010-10-09 04:07:38)

Arch Linux

#1 2010-10-02 18:08:28

My hard drive is randomly on full blast and the CPU at 50% usage...???

#2 2010-10-02 18:12:30

Re: My hard drive is randomly on full blast and the CPU at 50% usage...???

#3 2010-10-02 19:19:34

Re: My hard drive is randomly on full blast and the CPU at 50% usage...???

#4 2010-10-02 19:53:55

Re: My hard drive is randomly on full blast and the CPU at 50% usage...???

#5 2010-10-08 19:06:45

Re: My hard drive is randomly on full blast and the CPU at 50% usage...???

#6 2010-10-08 19:23:28

Re: My hard drive is randomly on full blast and the CPU at 50% usage...???

#7 2010-10-09 04:06:55

Re: My hard drive is randomly on full blast and the CPU at 50% usage...???

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