<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" ><tr><td valign="top" style="font: inherit;">i found this very interesting post on the subject.<br>and it seems to be tru<br><br>if i kill x on the same system, then the hard disk spins down, it's been down<br>for 9 min's now...and that's great. it seems gnome is not interested in not<br>writing data to the disk every 20 seconds. it must be a absolute killer<br>for home area's mounted over nfs. yikes...<br><br>i found a great post tucked away on a forum...sums everything up really.<br><br>so it's not really a gnome problem, it's a fundamental unix problem....<br><br>i'm betting macs suffer from this as well!! i wonder how bsd handles this.i bet<br>it's a lot cooler.<br><br>interesting stuff.<br><br><br>quote------------<br><br><span class="userContent">@andrewc231: My understanding is that it's a
combination of 3 things that lead to this effect.
1 and 2) The Bios and the hard drive have some power-management
settings and logic that control how aggressively the disk tries to save
power by spinning down when idle. A big factor in this aggressiveness
is how long a drive should be "idle" before spinning down. With laptops
shooting for better battery-lifetime reviews, and with a big
green/environmental focus of reviewers benchmarking power consumption,
the trend has been to set these settings more aggressively. Apparently
spinning down a drive after 30-60 seconds of being idle is not
uncommon.
3) Software that makes requests to the hard disk that would force it to
spin up. These include any reads not cached by the OS, and any writes
forced through the OS's buffers with fsync() or sync() or fdatasync()
or write() with O_DIRECT or the equivalents. A whole lot of software
seems to wake up more and more frequently triggering this problem. If
the software polls at slightly shorter time period than the spin-down
time, you never spin down the disk; so you never hear it park - but you
never save power either. (for example if the disk spins down after 50
seconds of idle time; and software polls the drive every 30 seconds).
If the software polls at slightly longer time period than the spin-down
time, you're in the worst case situation of spinning down and up
constantly. (for example if the disk spins down after 50 seconds of
idle time; and software polls the drive every 60 seconds).
I blame richer GUIs on Linux that tend to poll for stuff like email,
IMs, skype calls, software updates, etc very frequently and write their
status to disk when they poll.
On my laptop if I log in a text-only shell login; and don't have
postgres running, the disk spins down and stays quiet for long periods
of time.
On my laptop if I log in with Gnome and my typical desktop full of apps
I can see the exact same "problem" everyone else is seeing.
Perhaps the software and hardware guys should get together and discuss
what's a "reasonable" period of idle time; and how much should an
"idle" machine be accessing disks anyway.<br><br>-----------------<br></span><br><br>--- On <b>Sun, 18/10/09, Antony D'Auritura <i><antony@nekorb.co.uk></i></b> wrote:<br><blockquote style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(16, 16, 255); margin-left: 5px; padding-left: 5px;"><br>From: Antony D'Auria <antony@nekorb.co.uk><br>Subject: Re: [dundee] laptop mode power saving<br>To: "Tayside Linux User Group" <dundee@lists.lug.org.uk><br>Date: Sunday, 18 October, 2009, 8:13 PM<br><br><div id="yiv1419112187">Yep,<br>
<br>
<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php">http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php</a><br>
<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.srware.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=561">http://www.srware.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=561</a><br>
<br>
It's stilll alpha but great for my Netbook. The Linux version can just
be unpacked and run. There's a portable version if you
like it that much.<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2009/10/18 Nicholas Walker <span dir="ltr"><<a rel="nofollow" ymailto="mailto:tel0seh@googlemail.com" target="_blank" href="/mc/compose?to=tel0seh@googlemail.com">tel0seh@googlemail.com</a>></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
SRiron is the modified Chromium amirite?<div><div></div><div class="h5"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 6:48 PM, Antony D'Auria <span dir="ltr"><<a rel="nofollow" ymailto="mailto:antony@nekorb.co.uk" target="_blank" href="/mc/compose?to=antony@nekorb.co.uk">antony@nekorb.co.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">My netbook does run like it's on speed with Arch & Openbox :)
Battery life great. SRIron runs nice & quick, although not very configurable it does the job for just a bit of general browsing.<br><br>
Ant<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2009/10/18 Nicholas Walker <span dir="ltr"><<a rel="nofollow" ymailto="mailto:tel0seh@googlemail.com" target="_blank" href="/mc/compose?to=tel0seh@googlemail.com">tel0seh@googlemail.com</a>></span><div><div></div><div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
remove those bloated UI's and run openbox instead :D<div><div></div><div><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 4:44 PM, Lee Hughes <span dir="ltr"><<a rel="nofollow" ymailto="mailto:toxicnaan@yahoo.co.uk" target="_blank" href="/mc/compose?to=toxicnaan@yahoo.co.uk">toxicnaan@yahoo.co.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td style="font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-size: inherit; line-height: inherit; font-size-adjust: inherit; font-stretch: inherit;" valign="top">
hehe.. i suppose i could, just trying to get extended battery life. tee hee..<br><br>it's seems to be working a little better now.... looks like gnome is full a fsync's<br><br>fsync's seem to wake my system up!!!<br>
<br>how do i get rid of them.<br><br><br>--- On <b>Sun, 18/10/09, Jennifer higgins <i><<a rel="nofollow" ymailto="mailto:sauntering.with.scissors@gmail.com" target="_blank" href="/mc/compose?to=sauntering.with.scissors@gmail.com">sauntering.with.scissors@gmail.com</a>></i></b> wrote:<br><blockquote style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(16, 16, 255); margin-left: 5px; padding-left: 5px;">
<br>From: Jennifer higgins <<a rel="nofollow" ymailto="mailto:sauntering.with.scissors@gmail.com" target="_blank" href="/mc/compose?to=sauntering.with.scissors@gmail.com">sauntering.with.scissors@gmail.com</a>><br>Subject: Re: [dundee] laptop mode power saving<div><br>To: "Tayside Linux User Group" <<a rel="nofollow" ymailto="mailto:dundee@lists.lug.org.uk" target="_blank" href="/mc/compose?to=dundee@lists.lug.org.uk">dundee@lists.lug.org.uk</a>><br>
</div>Date: Sunday, 18 October, 2009, 3:20 PM<div><div></div><div><br><br><div>oh just power the laptop down you big geek ;)<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2009/10/18 Lee Hughes <span dir="ltr"><<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://mc/compose?to=toxicnaan@yahoo.co.uk">toxicnaan@yahoo.co.uk</a>></span><br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td style="font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-size: inherit; line-height: inherit; font-size-adjust: inherit; font-stretch: inherit;" valign="top">
hmm. well it seems that firefox writes one more file which is not to it's cache or<br>it's profile...it's...<br><br>lsof | grep firefox | grep tmp<br><br>firefox 27357 user 72u REG 8,1 0 6177091 /var/tmp/etilqs_2SWFrJKOPJgPeet (deleted)<br>
<br>etilqs seemed to be sqlite backwards?<br><br>bizzare.... any idea's what that is or how to relocated it to my ramdisk?<br><br>Cheers,<br>Lee<br><br><br><br>--- On <b>Sun, 18/10/09, Lee Hughes <i><<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://mc/compose?to=toxicnaan@yahoo.co.uk">toxicnaan@yahoo.co.uk</a>></i></b> wrote:<br>
<blockquote style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(16, 16, 255); margin-left: 5px; padding-left: 5px;"><br>From: Lee Hughes <<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://mc/compose?to=toxicnaan@yahoo.co.uk">toxicnaan@yahoo.co.uk</a>><br>
Subject: [dundee] laptop mode power saving<br>
To:
"Tayside Linux User Group" <<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://mc/compose?to=dundee@lists.lug.org.uk">dundee@lists.lug.org.uk</a>><br>Date: Sunday, 18 October, 2009, 3:06 PM<div><div></div><div>
<br><br><div><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tbody><tr><td style="font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-size: inherit; line-height: inherit; font-size-adjust: inherit; font-stretch: inherit;" valign="top">Right,<br>
<br>has any got laptop mode working successfully , i'm trying to get my hard disk to spin down as long as possible, <br><br>i've been using a combination of lm-profile, iotop -o -d 10 -b<br><br>now, i've nailed fire fox from fsyncing all the time, that's improved things some what,<br>
<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r23159573-Re-Make-Firefox-3x-more-responsive-with-a-simple-trick">http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r23159573-Re-Make-Firefox-3x-more-responsive-with-a-simple-trick</a><br>
<br>it's also faster too boot!<br><br>however, my hard disk sleeps for about 2mins, i've zapped syslog and klog for testing,<br>so there
should be nothing on the system that should need to wake the disk for writing.<br><br>however, kkjournald is waking the disk up, (presumable to write the journal to disk)<br>but the file system is mounted with <br><br>/dev/sda1 on / type ext3 (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro,commit=600)<br>
<br>so, it should only commit every 10
mins, or when we run low on memory.<br><br> PID USER DISK READ DISK WRITE SWAPIN IO COMMAND<br> 807 root 0 B/s 5.54 K/s 0.00 % 0.00 % [kjournald]<br> 3911 user 0 B/s 0.40 K/s 0.00 % 0.00 % gnome-power-manager<br>
<br><br>oh,actually i wonder if it's the gnome power manager, how ironic.. looks like<br>the gnome power manager might be forcing a sync...<br><br>yes, it seems that a lot of gnome componets are doing a fsync, thus waking my disk<br>
up.. :-(<br><br>all i want is, while i'm not reading new data(i.e uncached data from disk) , i want<br>applications to write (but delay that write until I say, or a timeout value).<br><br>i think over use of the fsync call may be
answer, but i think there's more to it than that.<br><br>my harddrives now been dormant for 10mins.... spin down nirvarna has been reached.<br><br>looks like killing the gnome power meter has stopped the spin ups... now that's<br>
ironic.. any replacements? or shall i go and hack it.<br><br>i wonder if this would do ssd's good too.<br><br>thoughts?<br><br>Cheers,<br><br>Lee<br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br></td></tr></tbody></table>
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