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

[Jim Jackson]

On Wed, 6 Jul 2005, Dave Whiteley wrote:

> 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.

Ah but what is making the cache dirty :-) that's the question.

I'm wondering what file system he has. I'd expect an ext3 (or other 
journalled file system) to savage the disk a bit more than say ext2.

Jim

>>
>> 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
>
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