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Home > Archive > Red Hat Topics > September 2006 > Constant Disk Access
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Constant Disk Access
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| Ed Hurst 2006-09-09, 1:15 am |
| I can't get to my CentOS box for a few days, but was wondering what
explanations folks might offer for a big annoyance: The drive light is
flashing constantly, as if the system is accessing the disk with
alarming frequency. This is a fast Maxtor 40GB which still tests out
solid and without flaws. After a recent update to CentOS 4.4-x86-64,
this behavior started.
What diagnostic tools would you folks suggest?
--
Ed Hurst
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| Spamless 2006-09-09, 1:15 am |
| On 2006-09-09, Ed Hurst <me@privacy.net> wrote:
> I can't get to my CentOS box for a few days, but was wondering what
> explanations folks might offer for a big annoyance: The drive light is
> flashing constantly, as if the system is accessing the disk with
> alarming frequency. This is a fast Maxtor 40GB which still tests out
> solid and without flaws. After a recent update to CentOS 4.4-x86-64,
> this behavior started.
>
> What diagnostic tools would you folks suggest?
How often? Every ten seconds or constantly.
Check in /etc/cron.d
I believe sysstat runs quite often! (but it should
just add a line to the logs - not much more ...)
| |
| Ed Hurst 2006-09-09, 1:15 am |
| Spamless wrote:
> On 2006-09-09, Ed Hurst <me@privacy.net> wrote:
>
> How often? Every ten seconds or constantly.
> Check in /etc/cron.d
> I believe sysstat runs quite often! (but it should
> just add a line to the logs - not much more ...)
Constant, literally. There is less than a second between each flash of
the harddrive indicator light.
--
Ed Hurst
----------
return addy is a spam trap
try je hurst at gmail dot com
| |
| Scott Lurndal 2006-09-10, 7:15 pm |
| Ed Hurst <me@privacy.net> writes:
>Spamless wrote:
>
>Constant, literally. There is less than a second between each flash of
>the harddrive indicator light.
Messages are logged to syslog with O_SYNC, causing a disk I/O for each line
in /var/log/messages (or wherever /etc/syslog.conf directs the messages).
Frequent disk activity may be due to excessive logging or attempted system
compromise (e.g. failed ssh connection attempts).
sar -d 5 10
will provide 10 samples, 5 seconds apart of disk activity.
Correlating sar(1) data with top(1) output may be indicative
of the process which is issuing the I/O.
scott
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| Ed Hurst 2006-09-11, 1:16 am |
| Scott Lurndal wrote:
> sar -d 5 10
>
> will provide 10 samples, 5 seconds apart of disk activity.
>
> Correlating sar(1) data with top(1) output may be indicative
> of the process which is issuing the I/O.
Thank you, Scott. I had to download the sysstat package to get the sar
command. The only question I have is what to make of "dev3-0" being the
only thing with any activity.
After digging around I found the updated KDE has an autostart command
which checks too often. When I changed 1000 milliseconds to 10,000 it
calmed down. Now I get a brief flash about every three seconds. I'm
guessing that's closer to normal for Linux.
--
Ed Hurst
----------
return addy is a spam trap
try je hurst at gmail dot com
| |
| Scott Lurndal 2006-09-11, 1:13 pm |
| Ed Hurst <me@privacy.net> writes:
>Scott Lurndal wrote:
>
>
>Thank you, Scott. I had to download the sysstat package to get the sar
>command. The only question I have is what to make of "dev3-0" being the
>only thing with any activity.
dev3-0 is the device identified by major number 3, minor number 0.
$ ls -l /dev | grep "3,"
brw------- 1 root disk 3, 0 Sep 5 11:24 hda
In my case, hda is a read-only optical device, in yours, probably
your primary hard drive.
scott
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| Ed Hurst 2006-09-11, 1:13 pm |
| Scott Lurndal wrote:
> dev3-0 is the device identified by major number 3, minor number 0.
>
> $ ls -l /dev | grep "3,"
> brw------- 1 root disk 3, 0 Sep 5 11:24 hda
>
> In my case, hda is a read-only optical device, in yours, probably
> your primary hard drive.
Quite correct. Again, thank you very much for the lesson. That command
was all the hint I needed to make sense of the whole major/minor device
issue.
--
Ed Hurst
----------
return addy is a spam trap
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