[Scottish] Damn those pesky processes....

[Paul Millar]

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Yep, in the past, I've been in a similar position:  wanting to figure out 
which process is responsible for disk activity.  It seems to be something you 
can't do easily.  One option might be BSD-style process accounting (although 
I've not tried it myself).  That might include some disk-IO stats, but 
(AFAIK) that only gets written when a process terminates.

If one process is spending a good percentage of its time in 
uninterruptable-sleep state, you should be able to catch it with state "D" 
using ps or top.

For a cause, obviously something's thrashing the disk.   That might be a badly 
configured machine, or (playing devil's advocate) it might be the disk 
controller not working properly:  you might want to check that your disks are 
using DMA correctly.

HTH,

Paul.

On Tuesday 20 July 2004 00:41, Kyle Gordon wrote:
> Could be updatedb running, if you have slocate or locate installed. Usually
> if the box is quiet, and something is thrashing the disk, then you can spot
> it with 'top'. Failing that, you could try lsof, netstat, vmstat, sar.
> 
> I know there are others, but I can't think of them at this time of the
> night :-(
> 
> On Monday 19 July 2004 22:09, Colin McKinnon wrote:
> > Something is producing rather a lot of load on some of my boxes. Idle time
> > stays high (>95%) and the swap isn't getting used but there seems to be a
> > lot of disk i/o. Can anybody suggest anything useful for tracking down the
> > problem? Is iohog available on Linux (haven't found it yet....but 
looking)?
> >
> > TIA,
> >
> > Colin
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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