laptop-mode-tools harddrive spinning up continously while idling

[Abdusamed Ahmed]

Binary package hint: laptop-mode-tools

I have laptop mode tools to be on all the time, on ac and battery because I want to lower the rate of increase load cycles.

The problem I'm facing is even after a clean reboot and left the computer to idle, my hard drive will keep on spinning regardless of what's happening! My cpu pretty much are at 1 percent. But the hard drive are spinning all the time. If I force them to sleep, they stay in that state for a while before they are fired up!

Yes..I have configuration-file-control.conf edited so that its enabled. Its attached if you want to look at it. Think to note is that I only changed the '0' to '1' because I assumed that the file already has the necessarily setting which most user face.

The laptop-mode-tool is also attached along with configuration-file-control.conf

Note, I have enabled all the conf.d. I only changed the 0 to 1 to enable it, haven't went any further in the while with the fear of crashing my system which won't be nice.

[Abdusamed Ahmed (sir508)]

I always forget to post my system

Ubuntu 10.04.1

2.6.32-25-generic #45-Ubuntu SMP Sat Oct 16 19:52:42 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux

laptop-mode-tools 1.52

[Ritesh Raj Sarraf (rrs)]

On 10/31/2010 08:42 AM, Abdusamed Ahmed wrote:
> The problem I'm facing is even after a clean reboot and left the
> computer to idle, my hard drive will keep on spinning regardless of
> what's happening! My cpu pretty much are at 1 percent. But the hard
> drive are spinning all the time. If I force them to sleep, they stay in
> that state for a while before they are fired up!
>

This looks like there is some process which is waking up the disk. Can
you run "lm-profiler" and figure out what could that be ?

Ritesh

--
Ritesh Raj Sarraf
RESEARCHUT - http://www.researchut.com
"Necessity is the mother of invention."

[Abdusamed Ahmed (sir508)]

What should I do after I find out the process? What should I be looking for?

[Ritesh Raj Sarraf (rrs)]

On 10/31/2010 12:29 PM, Abdusamed Ahmed wrote:
> What should I do after I find out the process? What should I be looking
> for?
>

lm-profiler will tell you the process that is causing frequent writes.
Once you know the faulty process, you will want to relate it to the
application it belongs to. Then see if the application is mis-behaving
or is designed to just write that frequent. If it can be tuned, tune it
else you might want to remove that faulty application.

Ritesh

--
Ritesh Raj Sarraf
RESEARCHUT - http://www.researchut.com
"Necessity is the mother of invention."

[Abdusamed Ahmed (sir508)]

I ran the lm-profiler. Once after doing work and once after clean boot. Below is the instance of clean boot which ended up with the same result. 'Gvfs-metadata' and 'jdb2/sda5-8' kept on popping up very frequently.

The problem is however, it may seem from the output that the system much have been very quiet, it wasn't. The HDD kept on spinning without showing any indication of slowing down for a break. If I forced them to sleep using the hdparm -Y command, they would instantly start spinning up without even stoping for a second with a 'flush 8.0' or 'flush 0.8' message showing in the terminal with lm-profiler command running.

Though I didn't want to but I decided to disable all the services it asked as 'standard recommendation' which I wanted to consult here before doing because I wanted to maximize complete utilization of laptop-mode-tools customization. Like I wanted to add this to 'configuration-file-control.conf' make my system kinda a bit more 'professional' so nothing is lost instead of simply disabling it!

For the side note, I created a 2 GB swap file after installing Ubuntu, I don't have a dedicated swap partition. I have 4 GIGS of ram too.

What should I do now? If you see my setting in my customized laptop-mode.conf, I haved edited to run laptop-mode-tools on AC also.

~$ sudo lm-profiler
[sudo] password for bahie:
Profiling run started.
Write accesses at 24/600 in lm-profiler run: bash
Write accesses at 30/600 in lm-profiler run: gvfsd-metadata jbd2/sda5-8
Write frequency :
      1 bash
      1 gvfsd-metadata
      1 jbd2/sda5-8
Read frequency :

Profiling run completed.

Program: "anacron"
Reason: standard recommendation (program may not be running)
Init script: /etc/init.d/anacron (GUESSED)

Do you want to disable this service in battery mode? [y/N]: y

Program: "cron"
Reason: standard recommendation (program may not be running)
Init script: /etc/init.d/cron (GUESSED)

Do you want to disable this service in battery mode? [y/N]: y

Program: "atd"
Reason: standard recommendation (program may not be running)
Init script: /etc/init.d/atd (GUESSED)

Do you want to disable this service in battery mode? [y/N]: y

Program: "cupsd"
Reason: listens on network, may not be needed offline.
Init script: /etc/init.d/cups (GUESSED)

Do you want to disable this service in battery mode? [y/N]: y

Program: "master"
Reason: listens on network, may not be needed offline.
Init script: /etc/init.d/hddtemp (GUESSED)

Do you want to disable this service in battery mode? [y/N]: y

Program: "mlnet"
Reason: listens on network, may not be needed offline.
Init script: /etc/init.d/mldonkey-server (GUESSED)

Do you want to disable this service in battery mode? [y/N]: y

Program: "monopd"
Reason: listens on network, may not be needed offline.
Init script: /etc/init.d/monopd (GUESSED)

Do you want to disable this service in battery mode? [y/N]: y

:~$

Although it does seem to stop a bit longer. But I'm still can't sure if it's fixed.