[solved]Harddrive is under constant IO activity

Roberth · 2013-06-08 18:57:50

Hello

I have 3 TB harddrive formatted with ext4, and mounted with "defaults,rw" and no pass or dump, which is all the time being read 2048 kb/s to about 4096 kb/s, it seem to most switch between those two rates, all the time while my filesystem which contains root is hardly ever reads more than 100 kb/s while the only software I run is default base with a minimal kde and chromium.

I run linux-ck from repo-ck with cfq.

Any ideas?

Last edited by Roberth (2013-06-10 17:36:02)

WonderWoofy · 2013-06-08 18:59:59

So what part of the filesystem is it, and can you use something like iotop or lsof to determine what it is actually reading? I think you need to provide more information here... as saying simply that your HDD is readig a lot is not really anything to go on here.

Roberth · 2013-06-08 19:08:55

"ext4lazyinit" is dissappearing and appearing with abotu 3 % all the time in iotop with the -o option, whatever that is?

graysky · 2013-06-08 19:26:41

Use iotop and sort by disk reads:

sudo iotop -Pao

Roberth · 2013-06-08 19:29:56

"jbd2/sdb2-8" is also at almost 1 % all the time, thats about it.

graysky · 2013-06-08 19:40:08

Roberth wrote:

"jbd2/sdb2-8" is also at almost 1 % all the time, thats about it.

By sorting by disk read or disk write you will see a cumulative listing to help you identify the culprit. For example, on my system:

Total DISK READ :       0.00 B/s | Total DISK WRITE :       0.00 B/s
Actual DISK READ:       0.00 B/s | Actual DISK WRITE:       0.00 B/s
  PID  PRIO  USER    DISK READ>  DISK WRITE  SWAPIN      IO    COMMAND                                                          
 2610 be/4 facade      412.00 K     68.00 K  0.00 %  0.00 % libpepflashplayer.so --ppapi-flas~eccomp-sandbox --scroll-pixels=300
  143 be/4 root          0.00 B      0.00 B  0.00 %  0.14 % [kworker/6:2]
  164 be/4 root          0.00 B    156.00 K  0.00 %  0.00 % systemd-journald
 1702 be/4 facade        0.00 B     12.00 K  0.00 %  0.00 % gnome-pty-helper
 3313 be/4 facade        0.00 B      4.00 K  0.00 %  0.00 % zsh
  894 be/4 root          0.00 B      0.00 B  0.00 %  0.00 % [flush-8:16]
  399 be/3 root          0.00 B    100.00 K  0.00 %  0.01 % [jbd2/sda2-8]
  951 be/4 facade        0.00 B      0.00 B  0.00 %  0.00 % xfdesktop
  441 be/3 root          0.00 B    112.00 K  0.00 %  0.11 % [jbd2/sdb1-8]

Roberth · 2013-06-08 19:54:58

Yes, and I am reporting what I see which has significantly with IO activity. The rest is like around 0.01 % IO, the ext4lazyinit process doesn't read or write, it just produces IO activity, I guess it has something to do with the filesystem itself?

graysky · 2013-06-08 20:09:20

No idea what ext4lazyinit is... take to google?

WonderWoofy · 2013-06-08 20:58:06

Apparently, ext4 has a feature in which mkfs.ext4 doesn't actually finish, and the final non-essential parts are written after the first mount (or subsequent mounts if not enough time is allowed). It sounds as though Roberth is having this happen all the time, which doesn't seem normal.

Roberth · 2013-06-08 21:02:29

Thank you for the good explanation, found the explanations I found on google to be, kind of unclear.

Well it happend just now when I created the filsystem, and it's 3 tb large, maybe that's the reason?

WonderWoofy · 2013-06-08 21:14:35

That could very well be the reason. Leave it running and mounted and see if the chatter subsides after a bit. Maybe it is just checking over things to make sure all the necessary parts are written. A 3TB rotational disk is a lot of storage to cover and check over, so this sounds reasonable.

Roberth · 2013-06-08 21:30:18

Yes, in the process when I resized the former filsystem on the partition, and created this one, and resized it to use the entire disk after I deleted the old one, took about 5 hours or so.

Roberth · 2013-06-10 09:34:27

Well when the night had gone by it was gone and IO was back to normal. But thanks, didn't even know iotop existed.

WonderWoofy · 2013-06-10 13:38:51

Neato! Please mark the thread as [Solved].

Arch Linux

#1 2013-06-08 18:57:50

[solved]Harddrive is under constant IO activity

#2 2013-06-08 18:59:59

Re: [solved]Harddrive is under constant IO activity

#3 2013-06-08 19:08:55

Re: [solved]Harddrive is under constant IO activity

#4 2013-06-08 19:26:41

Re: [solved]Harddrive is under constant IO activity

#5 2013-06-08 19:29:56

Re: [solved]Harddrive is under constant IO activity

#6 2013-06-08 19:40:08

Re: [solved]Harddrive is under constant IO activity

#7 2013-06-08 19:54:58

Re: [solved]Harddrive is under constant IO activity

#8 2013-06-08 20:09:20

Re: [solved]Harddrive is under constant IO activity

#9 2013-06-08 20:58:06

Re: [solved]Harddrive is under constant IO activity

#10 2013-06-08 21:02:29

Re: [solved]Harddrive is under constant IO activity

#11 2013-06-08 21:14:35

Re: [solved]Harddrive is under constant IO activity

#12 2013-06-08 21:30:18

Re: [solved]Harddrive is under constant IO activity

#13 2013-06-10 09:34:27

Re: [solved]Harddrive is under constant IO activity

#14 2013-06-10 13:38:51

Re: [solved]Harddrive is under constant IO activity

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