Arch Linux

RobF

Member

Registered: 2006-10-10

Posts: 157

Excessive HDD activity by an unidentied process brings system to crawl

While I'm doing normal work on my laptop, my system (up-to-date Arch i686 with KDE 4.7, Firefox 5.0) frequently goes into a state of incessant access to the internal HDD that may last many minutes.  During that time, all programs that need to go to the disk are practically frozen; the entire system comes to a crawl.  It is as though some unidentified program reads all of the 40 GB of files that sit in my home dir.  Of course that would take forever and monopolize HDD access.

KDE's System Monitor or htop don't show any particular program hogging the cpu's in that condition.  krunner is generally active but it uses only a few % of cpu resources.  When I kill krunner, that doesn't stop the continuous HDD activity.  Neither does logging out and in again: the HDD activity cannot be stopped, it continues grinding away for minutes.

Is there a utility that would tell me which process is responsible for virtually freezing the system by this excessive HDD activity?

litemotiv

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2008-08-01

Posts: 5,026

Re: Excessive HDD activity by an unidentied process brings system to crawl

You can use the iotop program to identify which process is doing all the IO.

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RobF

Member

Registered: 2006-10-10

Posts: 157

Re: Excessive HDD activity by an unidentied process brings system to crawl

You can use the iotop program to identify which process is doing all the IO.

Thanks.  I'll use that utility next time this problem occurs.