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#1 2010-09-20 20:14:17

Beelzebud
Member
From: Illinois, U.S.
Registered: 2010-07-16
Posts: 154

[Solved] KDE 4.5.1 constant disk i/o from /jbd2/sda4-8

I recently switched from Gnome to KDE 4.5, and have noticed one small problem, that this machine never had with Gnome.   I put conky on it (and have a disk io graph on my config) and last night I noticed that /dev/sda was being accessed every couple of seconds.   Using iotop I can see that very 2-3 seconds I get disk i/o access from a process called /jbd2/sda4-8.   I have read up on this, and it's got something to do with ext4 journaling.   I took a look at my fstab and noticed that two partitions on /dev/sda did not have the noatime flag, but adding that didn't correct this problem.   Some people say this can be caused by the HAL daemon, but in the Arch guide for KDE it says that HAL is necessary for KDE to automount drives.   One person suggested I try the command hal-disable-polling --device /sda, but when I tried that it just returns a message saying that /sda isn't removable media, and thus, polling wasn't running on it to begin with.   

The only other option I've seen would be to just remove HAL from the daemons entry in rc.conf, but then what would I do about KDE not showing the drives in Dolphin?

Looking over system logs revealed no errors either.   I'm just at a loss to see how to stop this.

Last edited by Beelzebud (2010-09-20 21:28:00)

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#2 2010-09-20 20:37:46

denisfalqueto
Member
From: ES, Brazil
Registered: 2006-03-24
Posts: 197

Re: [Solved] KDE 4.5.1 constant disk i/o from /jbd2/sda4-8

I'm not sure, but maybe you have the desktop indexing service running. You can disable it in System Settings -> Desktop Search -> Enabled Strigi Desktop File Indexer. When it is first enabled, it has to index all files that match its criteria, so maybe it is the culprit for the disk access. Over time, it should calm down, as the files indexed don't change that often.


Satisfied users don't rant, so you'll never know how many of us there are.

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#3 2010-09-20 20:44:06

Beelzebud
Member
From: Illinois, U.S.
Registered: 2010-07-16
Posts: 154

Re: [Solved] KDE 4.5.1 constant disk i/o from /jbd2/sda4-8

This is what I initially suspected as the culprit.  I guess I should have included that detail.   I have Strigi and Nepomuk disabled and am still getting the constant access from /jbd2/sda4-8.

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#4 2010-09-20 20:50:07

skunktrader
Member
From: Brisbane, Australia
Registered: 2010-02-14
Posts: 1,538

Re: [Solved] KDE 4.5.1 constant disk i/o from /jbd2/sda4-8

Perhaps conky is doing something that requires accessing a temporary file?

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#5 2010-09-20 21:06:46

Beelzebud
Member
From: Illinois, U.S.
Registered: 2010-07-16
Posts: 154

Re: [Solved] KDE 4.5.1 constant disk i/o from /jbd2/sda4-8

If it was conky wouldn't it be the process showing up in iotop?   /jdb2/sda4-8 is what comes up, and it's user is root.

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#6 2010-09-20 21:19:45

skunktrader
Member
From: Brisbane, Australia
Registered: 2010-02-14
Posts: 1,538

Re: [Solved] KDE 4.5.1 constant disk i/o from /jbd2/sda4-8

The only way to really find out is killall conky and see whether the mystery io continues

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#7 2010-09-20 21:27:43

Beelzebud
Member
From: Illinois, U.S.
Registered: 2010-07-16
Posts: 154

Re: [Solved] KDE 4.5.1 constant disk i/o from /jbd2/sda4-8

ah ha!  I'm an idiot.   I didn't understand how conky could be the culprit, considering I never saw this activity in Gnome.   But just for the sake of troubleshooting, I tried iotop while conky was killed, and the problem was gone.   

Then it hit me.    To set up conky with KDE, and make transparency work, you have to use feh to take a snapshot of the desktop background.   Conky was set to 2 second updates, so therefore feh was refreshing as well!   

I'm just glad I know exactly what the issue was.    This teaches me to double check the simple things first, before thinking of way more complicated things.    Thanks guys.   Marking this as solved.

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