On Wed, 2006-01-25 at 19:13 -0800, Olwe Bottorff wrote: > I've noticed how something on my Fedora3 seems to be > thrashing the hard drive(s) very hard and long--just > like a Windows box being rifled through by a virus > checker or a find started at /. What could it be? How > could I find out what's doing all the disk accessing? Most Linux systems are configured to run 'updatedb' once a day, which actually does do a find at /. Sometimes you can run 'top' to find out what program is running, though many processes don't use much CPU even if they're making many disk accesses. However, such programs do have to wait on I/O, and are given a 'D' flag in the output of 'ps' and 'top'. So, you could try doing ps ax | grep D to figure out what is slowing things down. Of course, a number of programs will probably pop up if you're running Gnome or another desktop environment, but that'll narrow it down. You might have to try a few times. The other main possibility is that you don't have enough RAM in your system, and active processes have to swap in/out a lot. Use 'top' or some other program to figure out how much memory and swap space is being used. A typical system will have a lot of RAM being used for buffers and cache, so the used % of RAM might seem high. There might be a few processes using a lot of RAM for no really good reason (such as a dead web browser plugin or who knows what). An easy way to figure out which programs are using a lot of memory is to run 'top' then press 'M' (yes, capital M) to sort by memory usage. Unfortunately, I've never really figured out how to interpret the 'VIRT', 'RES', and 'SHR' numbers properly (is xmms using 11 MB or 152 MB? uh..), but it should provide a good pointer. -- Mike Hicks <hick0088 at tc.umn.edu> -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20060126/cac35e90/attachment.pgp