Just after I boot up I get this wierd HDD activity that lasts for some time during which my system runs at snail Pace and or Hangs.
After a while the activity stops and things are good and then randomly it all starts again.
I have read some forum post on constant HDD activity but they do not seem to apply to my problem.
I am Running 11.3 with a quad core AMD 64bit CPU and 4GB of memory.
Does anyone know whats going on ??:\
Start your diagnosis by running “top” from a Konsole while the drive is busy. Observe the CPU usage by currently running processes. I believe this has been answered before on this forum but I can’t remember what the process was. A search of the forums using the process name should yield some solutions.
On 08/08/2010 10:06 AM, ionmich wrote:
>
> Start your diagnosis by running “top” from a Konsole while the drive is
> busy. Observe the CPU usage by currently running processes. I believe
> this has been answered before on this forum but I can’t remember what
> the process was. A search of the forums using the process name should
> yield some solutions.
Is your hard drive 1 TB or larger? perhaps you have a problem with 4K disk
sectors and misaligned partitions.
Thanks for the feedback
I have searched this in the forum previously and yes, something like this has been mentioned here:Too much HDD activity.
However I noted the suggestion is to move back to ext2 filesystem, which I have not done but did make some of the other changes to /etc/nscd.conf.
I do not have a file called /etc/master.cf
I have also turned off critical logging on the firewall.
I find it has not changed anything which is why I posted this thread.
In answer to the HDD size yes I am using a 1 TB drive with ext4 with whatever the default option settings are.
I have it Partitioned like this
2 GB swap
30 GB /
and the rest is /home (greedy Ha!)
cheers
In answer to the HDD size yes I am using a 1 TB drive with ext4 with whatever the default option settings are.
lwfinger wanted to find out if you have one of these modern HD drives with 4kb physical sectors. You should give the exact specification of your drive.
Example: WD10EARS (which has the 4kb sectors)
On 08/09/2010 09:36 AM, vodoo wrote:
>
>> In answer to the HDD size yes I am using a 1 TB drive with ext4 with
>> whatever the default option settings are.
>
> lwfinger wanted to find out if you have one of these modern HD drives
> with 4kb physical sectors. You should give the exact specification of
> your drive.
>
> Example: WD10EARS (which has the 4kb sectors)
I just upgraded the disk driver for an 11.1 system from 500 GB to 1 TB using a
WD Caviar Green TSD-1000EARS, which does have 4K sectors. After the upgrade, the
system would pause for 10-15 seconds. Using ‘top’ showed no CPU activity, and
‘iotop’ showed kjournald as the only I/O. I have not yet fixed the problem, but
I think it is due to the misalignment of the sectors. For a 4K sector size, you
get alignment if the partition starts at a sector number that is a multiple of
8, and mine do not.
There are some reports on the Web that Windows XP must have its boot partition
starting at sector 63. I have not verified that, nor do I boot Windows at all.
In reply to your previous question I am using a WD WDC10EADS 1TB drive do not know if this has 4KB sectors.
On 08/14/2010 02:36 AM, jmdl wrote:
>
> In reply to your previous question I am using a WD WDC10EADS 1TB drive
> do not know if this has 4KB sectors.
It does. I have this same drive. I had to save all the data from the disk,
delete all partitions, and recreate them making sure that all of them started at
sectors that are a multiple of 8. Use the -u switch to get readings in sectors.
On my old scheme, partition 1 started at sector 63 - it was immediately wrong.
After doing this, my long pauses with only disk activity went away.
What I did not try was using a “-b 4096” switch to set the sector size. That
might have made things a bit easier.
Ok thanks for that.
I will have to give it a go.
I have never Partitioned from the CLI before , always just let the installation do it with some minor changes.
Are there any GUI partitioners you know that will let me do this. I have tried pmagic 5.2 but it dosen’t give me to much detail on the drives.
If not it will be a good learning experience I guess.
Cheers.
On 08/14/2010 10:06 PM, jmdl wrote:
> Are there any GUI partitioners you know that will let me do this. I
> have tried pmagic 5.2 but it dosen’t give me to much detail on the
> drives.
> If not it will be a good learning experience I guess.
It did not work for me either.
Ok guys, be careful. Those Western Digital Caviar Green drives with a designation ending in ‘RS’ have physical 4k sectors, the others (‘DS’) don’t.
See: http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-701229.pdf.
User jmdl may have a completely different problem. Can you check for an elevated amount of iowait states typically seen, when there is a sector alignment mismatch?
For re-formatting use parted. I gave an example of how to do it in a link above. It is not difficult at all once you understand what we have to do.
Voodo,
My drive ends in DS W10EADS so does this mean I do not have a sector Misalignment issue as it is not a drive with 4KB sectors?
I ran a vmstat during a non responsive period with lots of Drive activity happening and noted the wa Column was ranging up into the 70’s. When all the activity stopped I noted the range in the wa column was less than 10. Is this what you mean by iowait?
If so would you consider this enough to indicate that I need to re-partition.
This is the partioning output from parted
Model: ATA WDC WD10EADS-00P (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 1953525168s
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 2048s 4208632s 4206585s primary linux-swap(v1) type=82
2 4208640s 67119103s 62910464s primary ext4 boot, type=83
3 67119104s 1953523711s 1886404608s primary ext4 type=83
I am getting a little confused here!
cheers
On 08/17/2010 07:06 AM, jmdl wrote:
>
> Voodo,
>
> My drive ends in DS W10EADS so does this mean I do not have a sector
> Misalignment issue as it is not a drive with 4KB sectors?
>
> I ran a vmstat during a non responsive period with lots of Drive
> activity happening and noted the wa Column was ranging up into the 70’s.
> When all the activity stopped I noted the range in the wa column was
> less than 10. Is this what you mean by iowait?
>
> If so would you consider this enough to indicate that I need to
> re-partition.
>
> This is the partioning output from parted
>
> Model: ATA WDC WD10EADS-00P (scsi)
> Disk /dev/sda: 1953525168s
> Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
> Partition Table: msdos
>
> Number Start End Size Type File
> system Flags
> 1 2048s 4208632s 4206585s primary
> linux-swap(v1) type=82
> 2 4208640s 67119103s 62910464s primary ext4
> boot, type=83
> 3 67119104s 1953523711s 1886404608s primary ext4
> type=83
>
>
> I am getting a little confused here!
Your partitions all start at a sector number that is a multiple of 8, thus it
does not matter if your disk has 512 or 4096 byte sectors.
I diagnosed my disk activity problem (which was a misalignment on a 4K sector
disk) by running iotop to see what process was doing the disk operations.