El Lunes, 27 de Diciembre de 2004 16:37, Pol escribi�: > Hi all, > > I am running deb/unstable with kde 3.3.1 gui on my acer > travelmate laptop (intel centrino cpu). > In the last few days, my laptop has become almost unusable > due to overloading input/output to the disk, that seems > to be triggered both by desktop applications (e.g.kpackages, > kaffeine, etc) and terminal applications entered through > the konsole terminal emulation, e.g. apt-get, that freezes > reading the database. > > As I have checked out, enough free swap area seems to be > available, so no reason of such i/o is evident.
To fire disk i/o activity this is the perfect reason. You have swap area available, and the kernel wants to use it. Look what effect has setting /proc/sys/vm/swappiness. 0 -> almost no swap use, 100 -> everything to swap quickly. Remember no swap means no disk cache in memory. > Furthermore, from the system monitor on the kde panel > displays one gets that almost 100% cpu is busy due to system > activity, while 'top' is detecting a very low cpu > activity - i cannot explain such inconsistent behaviour. > > Here are my questions: > - What can be the origin of such high i/o traffic? May be the loggin system? Sometimes famd goes crazy to the 100% and I have to restart it. > - Why do the kde panel and 'top' report such different informations? That is very strange. May be in top you do not calculate the total sum for all procceses. > - How can i detect the program (system processes behind > the running desktop application) that is actually performing i/o ? Sure there is a better way, but, a lsof -n | grep / | grep -v /proc | grep -v /lib/ | less will tell you all open files. May be it gives you a clue. I have read several times for laptops you should mount fs without atime, disable kernel logging, and tune syslog via /etc/syslog.conf
