constant disk access

[donde]

Ubuntu 8.04 and all up to date Updates fresh installed on Fujitsu laptop P 5010D.

Always see constant disk access except at login/password sequence. This has to be wearing my hard drive out.
I have seen many references to this problem on the Ubuntu forum with no fixes anyone can feel is a real fix. This problem has to be addressed, and is critical. Ubuntu users will go to another OS, fearing damage to their hard drive. None of us want to see that. Outside of this problem, Ubuntu is a great system.I have no problem like this on my desktop, just the laptop. Almost all of the complaints refer to a laptop.

I need to know if the Ubuntu Team is looking into to this problem, and will fix it soon.

Please help, thanks,

Don DeGregori

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and make Ubuntu better. We need to try and determine what process is using your hard disk. To do this, could you please try running 'iotop' from the terminal and report back which processes are using the most disk I/O? Iotop is not installed by default, and is not available in the normal Ubuntu software channels. However, it is available from Tormod Volden's PPA, which can be accessed here: https://launchpad.net/~tormodvolden/+archive.

Please note that high disk I/O can be a symptom of many different problems. Whilst there might be a few people exhibiting high disk I/O, there could be many different causes for this. This means that your problem may be unrelated to the problems seen by (or discussed by) other people with these symptoms. Your problem is not 'critical', as there is no evidence to suggest that it is affecting a large number of users.

You could also try disabling Tracker (if enabled) to see if your problem goes away.

Thank you

[donde (don1mh)]

Hi Chris,

I found: PID 5458 donde 78.63 K/s write
               PID 2442 root 22.90 K/s write

Both flashed by very fast, not at same time. PID 2442 seemed most frequent.
Did repeated check, using Snapshot application to capture. The iotop
program should have a way to capture any write. With Snapshot, you have
to be very quick.

Hope this helps to figure out the constant disk access.

Thanks, donde

Chris Coulson wrote:
> Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and make Ubuntu better.
> We need to try and determine what process is using your hard disk. To do
> this, could you please try running 'iotop' from the terminal and report
> back which processes are using the most disk I/O? Iotop is not installed
> by default, and is not available in the normal Ubuntu software channels.
> However, it is available from Tormod Volden's PPA, which can be accessed
> here: https://launchpad.net/~tormodvolden/+archive.
>
> Please note that high disk I/O can be a symptom of many different
> problems. Whilst there might be a few people exhibiting high disk I/O,
> there could be many different causes for this. This means that your
> problem may be unrelated to the problems seen by (or discussed by) other
> people with these symptoms. Your problem is not 'critical', as there is
> no evidence to suggest that it is affecting a large number of users.
>
> You could also try disabling Tracker (if enabled) to see if your problem
> goes away.
>
> Thank you
>
>
> ** Changed in: ubuntu
> Status: New => Incomplete
>
>

[Harvey Muller (hlmuller)]

The information Chris needs is the command name, which is the far right column. PIDs are an arbitrary identifier, except for 1 which is always the init process.

If you have the screenshot, I recommend visiting the bug in launchpad and attaching it to a comment. Email replies to bugs do not add attachments.

Thanks

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

Harvey is right - process names would be more useful. However, if those numbers are the highest numbers, then there isn;t a lot of disk activity going on here at all. The numbers are very low.

I'm not sure whether iotop shows disk activity from memory management tasks such as swapping, and I can't check at the minute as I'm at work. Out of interest, could you post the output of:

free -m

Thanks

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

Right, I've checked at home and iotop does show things like swapping. With the information presented here so far, there isn't really any evidence of excessive disk activity at all.

Could you please still provide the output of 'free -m'. In addition, could you attach the following to this bug report as separate uncompressed files in accordance with the kernel team bug policy (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeamBugPolicies):

1) Output of sudo lspci -vvvn
2) Output of dmesg
3) Output of uname -a
4) Output of cat /proc/version_signature

It would also be worth attaching your /var/log/syslog

Thanks in advance.

[Harvey Muller (hlmuller)]

Chris,

Don has isolated the flashing drive led, to his removable CD-RW device. Based on his response in the related question, I do not think he will be responding to the bug. Therefore you can probably close the bug, or just let it expire.

Best regards,

Harvey

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

Harvey,

Thanks for assisting Don in Answer #38043. As this is no longer a problem, I will mark this bug Invalid.

Thank you