Hi All,
I’m running 11.4 on my Sony Vaio: 1.72 Ghz> 2gig RAM> KDE
I’ve Googled, forum searched and cannot figure out why my hard drive is running all of the time. It doesn’t seem to be seeking, just running. The HDD light stays on steady.
I haven’t added any new software recently and I cannot recall exactly when it started doing it but, it has been in the last week or so.
Any help or ideas are welcome. Thanks,
Greydog
Hi All,
I’m running 11.4 on my Sony Vaio: 1.72 Ghz> 2gig RAM> KDE
I’ve Googled, forum searched and cannot figure out why my hard drive is running all of the time. It doesn’t seem to be seeking, just running. The HDD light stays on steady.
I haven’t added any new software recently and I cannot recall exactly when it started doing it but, it has been in the last week or so.
Any help or ideas are welcome. Thanks,
Greydog
You could run the System Monitor (ksysguard), press the CPU column and sort based on CPU usage which might show the program in question. Some folks have complained about the application Tracker doing this. You can open YaST / Software / Software Management and search on** tracker and uninstall it if its found. Some have said this can be caused by Nepomuk** in KDE. You can open the menu / Personnel Settings / Workspace Appearance and Behaviour / Desktop Search and unckeck Enable Nepomuk Semantic Desktop.
Thank You,
iotop is pretty handy as well.
Also worth noting, some of us have had to remove preload and it’s kernel module. Check and see if that keeps a heavy load after boot.
Thanks for all of the ideas.
Starting at the top.
Tracker is not installed and Nepomuk is unchecked. Keyguard shows Packagekitd refreshing at the top of the list.
I checked for running apps and found that JBD2 is updating pretty regularly, like every 15-20 seconds.
Additionally, I’ve moved to a quieter location and I can now hear the heads tracking at about the same rate as the JBD2 activity.
I’ve also checked some of the log files and both /var/log/zypper.log and /wpa_supplicant.log were pretty big.
I looked for preload but I’m going to need some help with that one.
Any more ideas? Thanks a lot
Greydog
JBD2 has something to do with journaling on EXT4 partitions as I understand it. So it makes sense that this is associated with the disk activity. But that does not mean it is at fault. I ran into one issue with openSUSE 11.3 where activating hplip (for HP printers) caused a log file to keep getting ever bigger until all disk space was used. I found a command that can locate the largest top 10 logs which could be useful to look at. Open up a terminal session and run the following command:
ls -lS /var/log/*log | head
When I run this on my PC I come up with the following list:
james@linux-6m6e:~> ls -lS /var/log/*log | head
-rw-r----- 1 root root 7822426 Aug 31 19:19 /var/log/zypper.log
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 292292 Aug 31 19:25 /var/log/lastlog
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 147655 Aug 31 19:28 /var/log/vbox-install.log
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 94364 Aug 31 19:25 /var/log/kdm.log
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 53513 Aug 31 19:24 /var/log/nvidia-installer.log
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 22872 Sep 3 19:34 /var/log/Xorg.0.log
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 9009 Aug 31 06:03 /var/log/xinetd.log
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 4806 Aug 31 19:26 /var/log/mcelog
-rw------- 1 root root 3648 May 28 22:44 /var/log/faillog
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 2173 Aug 31 19:25 /var/log/pm-powersave.log
To look at the entire file you can use this command (q=Quit):
less /var/log/zypper.log
To look at a constantly updating file you can use this command that shows the last 10 lines of the file, but continues to output if more is added to the file (Ctrl-C to Quit):
tail -f /var/log/zypper.log
Let us know if this helps find anything.
Thank You,