Occassionally on my new server (Mandrake 2006) something starts a *lot* of disk activity causing the desktop to get very sluggish for 5 minutes or so. Very likely some database indexing files on the drive.
CPU load remains very low - it's just the disk being thrashed that causes everything else to slow down significantly. Loading Firefox will take 45 seconds instead of 3-5 seconds for example. Two questions: 1) Is there any simple way of determining which process is associated with significant disk activity? 2) What solutions are available for reducing desktop sluggishness because some database or other is reindexing? Would moving key data directories (/home) to a separate drive away from application binaries help? Thanks.
