Arch Linux

new2arch

Member

Registered: 2008-02-25

Posts: 235

Hard drive activity

Hi all,

I'm little curious on why my harddrive with Arch regularly decides "to do" stuff in the background?
We're talking something like every couple of hours. I haven't measured the frequency though.
When it decides to go active, the computer isn't usable at all - everything just freezes and I can't access anything until the drive settles down. I also noticed the drive goes nuts when I do an initial pacman -Syu of the day. We're talking 15-20 seconds of disc activity.

I don't have any extra stuff in crond, I have disabled 'atime' and there's no antivirus that automatically checks for virus definitions. My laptop, also with Arch, doesn't give me this issue.

Any idea?

Filesystem is Ext3. Harddrive is Seagate Barracuda, SATA 320 gb.
Edit: should also add that swap usage is zero when this happens.

Thanks.

Last edited by new2arch (2008-09-26 17:41:16)

Xyne

Administrator/PM

Registered: 2008-08-03

Posts: 6,963

Website

Re: Hard drive activity

Maybe trying

pacman-optimize && sync

would improve the performance of "pacman -Syu". (from the wiki: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Imp … erformance

I have no idea what would cause the disk slowdown every couple of hours. I would probably start by checking everything that's running, but you've probably already done that.

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new2arch

Member

Registered: 2008-02-25

Posts: 235

Re: Hard drive activity

Maybe trying

pacman-optimize && sync

would improve the performance of "pacman -Syu". (from the wiki: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Imp … erformance

I have no idea what would cause the disk slowdown every couple of hours. I would probably start by checking everything that's running, but you've probably already done that.

Thanks for the tip. I do the the pacman-optimize thing once in a while, but it doesn't help.
I suspect it must have something to do with the cron jobs or possibly log rotate or something but I haven't tinkered with those parameters at all.

new2arch

Member

Registered: 2008-02-25

Posts: 235

Re: Hard drive activity

I think I've found the culprit.
The drive did its stuff again and I ran 'top'. It was the updatedb kicking in.

...I've moved updatedb to cron.weekly. I guess I can do manual updatedb if needed, so why not move it into the montly folder.

Last edited by new2arch (2008-09-26 22:20:04)