[Gllug] what is causing disk activity ?

[Alain Williams]

On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 04:36:23PM +0000, Luke Dudney wrote:
> On 20/11/08 16:29, Martin A. Brooks wrote:
> >Alain Williams wrote:
> >  
> >>>You're using a journalling filesystem?
> >>>     
> >>>      
> >>Yes: ext3
> >>    
> >
> >There you go then.
> >  
> Translation: You'll see journal commits -- a blip of disk io -- every 
> five seconds by default.
> 
> Would this explain "continual chattering" ?

250-500 write/second (measured in 5 second intervals). I'm struggling
to see what it would have to write. Possibly access times (inodes) on open
files by the 200 odd processes[**] that are running on the box.

[**] Nothing special, a full CentOS gnome desktop + nagios,
openvpn (not busy), exim (can be busy) + spamd & clam, quiet web server,
firefox always open (20 odd tabs), opera, openoffice.
setroubleshootd eats memory like it is going out of fashion (660M), as do
some others (firefox 920M, OpenOffice 1.2G, clamd 460M, sealer 540M, X.org 650M).
It is a good thing that I have 4GB on this 64 bit box.

-- 
Alain Williams
Linux/GNU Consultant - Mail systems, Web sites, Networking, Programmer, IT Lecturer.
+44 (0) 787 668 0256  http://www.phcomp.co.uk/
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Past chairman of UKUUG: http://www.ukuug.org/
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