Hard Drive monitor?

[wyohman]

I've recently noticed a "pause" of about three to five seconds with a lot of disk activity. I've tried running to but by time I get control back the process has ended. Anyone know of a program that can monitor and log activity so I can debug this problem?

Cheers.

[ThirdOfSix]

You can use Htop.

Set it up to show RBYTES,WBYTES,and IO RATE.
Have it sort on IO RATE.
Now move this to desktop 2.

Now when your extreme IO starts, click on desktop 2 to show Htop.

Even if response seems non-existant, there usually is a response even  though there is a long delay. So it will probably switch to desktop 2 while the activity is still happening. If it does, the culprit will be at the top of the list.

If things are so slow that you can not switch to desktop 2, just go to it as soon as you can and sort on RBYTES or WBYTES. If your mystory process is really doing extreme IO, it ought to show as one of the largest IO processes.

[wyohman]

Thanks for that. It looks like Firefox is eating a lot of disk. I've tried the suggestions to turn off the site check but that didn't make a difference. I'll keep looking.

Cheers.

[markzl]

I have also noticed this with firefox since i started using it about a year ago. It also does it in windows. It seems to happen only when i have 4 or more tabs open at a time, internet explorer does not do this regardless of how  many tabs are open.

If you find a solution pls post it here. I did not think to check the mozilla site before, but now that i know it's not just my imagination, i think it's time i did.

thanks.