[Gllug] GNOME Disk Activity

[Matthew Allum]

I know gnome uses fam [1], to monitor for things like .desktop files
getting changed / added so it can update menus etc on the fly. 

However the Linux implementation uses DNOTIFY [2] so it can get signaled
on a disk change rather than continually poll the disk. 

So either maybe you dont have fam installed and gnome is dropping back
to continually poll the disk :( or you are running an older ( 2.2.x ?
) kernel that lacks DNOTIFY support, and thus again polling is used
instead.

Of course I could be completely wrong and it could be nothing to do
with gnome and infact be something like ext3, which likes to play with
the disks quite frequently ( IIRC ).

  -- Matthew

[1] http://oss.sgi.com/projects/fam/
[2] http://www.linuxhq.com/kernel/v2.4/doc/dnotify.txt.html

on Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 04:56:57PM +0000, Mick Farmer wrote:
> Dear Colleagues,
> 
> When I run GNOME, the disk light flashes approximately every
> two seconds and iostat reports that 24 blocks are written
> approximately every two seconds.  Does anyone know what's
> causing this activity?  I can't see anything in the logs.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Mick               /"\                      
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