Intermittently my Linux spontaneously dedicates itself to persuading my boot HDD make noise. Suddenly I'm living in a mode where new windows open slowly, commands take a long time to complete. Usually I first try `sync` to stop this. If that recovery doesn't work, then I `reboot`. But today, at such a time, I recovered by more persistently repeating `sync`, maybe a dozen times. Is this intermittent churning of my disk somehow my fault? I run my own kernels almost exclusively, so I have almost no comparative experience of kernels built by people who know what they are doing. Google tells me I do not suffer alone, and suggests I study /proc/meminfo. Pat LaVarre http://linux-pel.blog-city.com/read/617872.htm P.S. Once while suffering, I recorded: $ uname -r 2.6.6-bk6 $ $ time sync ; time sync ; time sync real 0m5.657s ... real 0m1.259s ... real 0m39.157s ... $ Also: $ cat /proc/meminfo MemTotal: 498792 kB MemFree: 3728 kB Buffers: 16912 kB Cached: 32592 kB ... Dirty: 5124 kB Writeback: 0 kB Mapped: 121720 kB Slab: 344544 kB Committed_AS: 133152 kB PageTables: 1436 kB ... Normal i.e. now without reboot is sync complete in 0.006s and different /proc/meminfo ... MemFree: 4332 kB Buffers: 6148 kB Cached: 75100 kB ... Dirty: 0 kB Writeback: 0 kB Mapped: 175612 kB Slab: 274460 kB Committed_AS: 369668 kB PageTables: 1704 kB ... -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
