Hi,
SWMBO complained the Pi's NVMe's activity light flashes away a lot when
she doesn't think she's doing much other than ‘thinking’. Given the
darkened room once the screensaver has kicked in, she notices.
I just ran fatrace(8) to record a minute's disk activity, sitting in
a logged-in XFCE4 desktop, with Firefox minimised, and some terminal
windows open. Pretty much as she'd have.
sudo -i fatrace -tu -s 60 >/tmp/activity
It shows pmproxy(1) doing open, read, close on /etc/hosts every couple
of seconds. Odd, though that wouldn't reach the NVMe. Then
pmdalinux(1) does a burst of O, R, C on /etc/passwd four times in a row;
again, no NVMe required. Finally pmlogger(1) writes a few times to
/var/log/pcp/pmlogger/foo/20260913.09.49.0
/var/log/pcp/pmlogger/foo/20260913.09.49.index
I think this is all under the Performance Co-Pilot, package pcp, which
was only pulled in because I'm used to running dstat(1) to watch CPU,
disk, or network activity, but the old Python dstat script was replaced
by the PCP version. So I might purge PCP to see if the complaints stop.
Anyway, I thought others might be interested to see how simple it is to
observe what's accessing what files; just one ‘sudo -i fatrace’ away.
--
Cheers, Ralph.
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