[Wylug-discuss] Which process is accessing the hard drive?

[Dave Whiteley]

On Wednesday 06 Jul 2005 11:03, Borph at gmx.de wrote:
> Am 06.07.2005, 10:42 Uhr, schrieb David Holden <dh at iucr.org>:
> >   lsof
>
> I think this is listing the open files, but you don't know wether there is
> 'activity' or not.
> I found out myself that the kernel flush daemon writes the dirty cache to
> disc every 5 seconds, sounds pretty much like this! Also: there is a
> /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode, but this doesn't seem to work on mine.
>
> I will mess around with the flush times. Apparently Linux doesn't seem to
> be very suitably for laptops out of the box - it commits every 5 seconds,
> but it writes then only data which is dirty for more then 30 seconds, not
> all dirty data.
>
> Thanks so long anyway!
> Peter

I seem to remember an article in a fairly recent issue of the Linux Journal 
that discussed ways of minimising hard disk activity to save batteries on 
laptops.  

Dave

-- 

Dave Whiteley
d.l.whiteley at ee.leeds.ac.uk
Phone +44 (0)113 343 2059
School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering
The University of Leeds. Leeds, LS2 9JT,  UK