Message: 10 Date: Sun, 27 Apr 2003 18:31:18 -0400 (EDT) From: "Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: Red Hat 9 mailing list <shrike-list@xxxxxxxxxx> Subject: what's accessing my hard drive every few seconds? Reply-To: shrike-list@xxxxxxxxxx
(i recall someone asking something like this recently, but i managed to not save the response, if there was one.)
on my dell inspiron 8100, when it's just sitting there idling, there is a regular blast of HD activity, just about every 5 seconds. just a "tick tick" ... pause ... "tick tick" etc etc.
someone suggested that perhaps magicdev was responsible but i'm not running magicdev. i've looked through the list of running
processes, and nothing jumps out at me as needing to regularly
do disk activity.
any hints?
rday
The most likely thing I can think of that may be causing regular disk access is the usual Linux disk sync process. If not much real I/O were going on, it'd be just a tick here and there, with a somewhat longer burst when new data is read or written out.
There may also be one or more daemon processes on your system that are going out and causing short, regular I/O patterns. Not sure what specific process that might be, but on Linux systems, daemon processes are things that remain running and activate either to check activity or to perform a specific duty.
-- Brian Masinick mailto:masinick@xxxxxxxxx
