Hard drive activity.

[theharvester]

Hello all,
Last night I was installing a program in my Virtual Box XP install. I noticed my PCLOS was running slow (web surfing while installing program).
Checking into it I closed all Linux programs and noticed the hard drive light was nearly solid. Even after the install was complete XP shut down and Virtual Box closed the drive was still being accessed. Both cores were at 75% (or so)  memory was showing 2.8 Gb used (while VB was running) and swap was 650Mb or so but no other Linux programs were running.

After a computer re-start it isn't doing it now.

I was thinking it was VB resizing the drive but it continued after the program was installed and VB was closed down. The program I was installing added about 5 gigs to XP and I have VB set as a dynamic drive.


Is there a way to figure out what was causing it? Or if it happens again, what is causing it?


Computer specs:
PCLinuxOS 2010 fully updated Gnome
Intel core 2 duo 2.66Ghz
4 Gb ram (listed as 3.2 Gb or there a bouts)
320 Gb WD Raptor (PCLOS install)
300Gb WD Raptor (XP dual boot)
2 Tb WD (backup storage drive)

Virtual Box specs:
15 Gb dynamic drive with XP SP3
1024 Mb system memory
16Mb video memory

thanks,
Harvey.

[Old-Polack]

theharvester:

It's not uncommon for things to be going on in the background of a Linux installation. It could have been locate refreshing it's database. Very rarely do I pay any attention to what's happening, disk activity wise, as long as the system is running smoothly. If things seem to run slowly, I'll check top to see what's using the resources, and possibly shut something down temporarily, until I finish my immediate tasks, but mostly I just let things run through whatever they are doing.

Stopping running processes that you think shouldn't be running, as often as not, causes problems later on. Over the years I've found things remain running more smoothly overall, if I let the system just finish whatever it wants to do.

[menotu]

On top of old-polacks wise words. sometimes apps/files etc etc just don't "release" themselves properly therefore the cpu will carry on holding onto those processes and whilst other new ones are being accessed it just overloads the system and occasionally its your poor old hard drive that pays the price 

I must say it happened to me a couple of days ago and my widget was showing cpu usage fluctuating between 80 - 100% and my disk was being thrashed  (reminded me of my old head master  )

I closed down the apps I had open - waited a few minutes -  and after a reboot everything was hunky dory again.

Pleased to say this is a very rare occurrence.

[theharvester]

Thanks guys. I am used to a bit of activity here and there but it just seemed to be going on for quite a while hot and heavy. Other than adding and removing packages (through synaptic of course) I tend to leave the system alone. I was just curious as to the activity because that is what was happening quite a bit just before something (drive and/or install) took a dump.
Thanks again,
Harvey.

[Texstar]

Each week the system does a log rotate and compresses all the logs in the /var/log folder and some other system maintenance. This will run for a couple of minutes and usually will slow your system down during the process as there will be cpu and hard drive activity.

[Old-Polack]

Thanks guys. I am used to a bit of activity here and there but it just seemed to be going on for quite a while hot and heavy. Other than adding and removing packages (through synaptic of course) I tend to leave the system alone. I was just curious as to the activity because that is what was happening quite a bit just before something (drive and/or install) took a dump.
Thanks again,
Harvey.

Did you check to see how much swap was being used? If stuff was being swapped out of memory to the swap partition, that would cause the symptoms you describe.

[theharvester]

Thank you Texstar Now I will know whats going on instead of just wondering.  As stated earlier it seemed to be doing it quite a bit just before a drive failure and was now wondering if something (hardware related) may have caused the drive failure.

Old-Polack,
Yes it was showing something like 650 Mb swap being used. That is actually the first time I have seen swap being used, although I don't monitor the system all that often.