On Thu, 2005-11-03 at 10:16 +1300, Phill Coxon wrote: > 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?
I generally find the miscreant process (usually updatedb) in the top few lines of top. Mind you, I'm running an encrypted interface to the HDD so am *very* io-bound. > 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? If it is updatedb, editing /etc/updatedb.conf (or /etc/cron.daily/slocate, or the equivalent on your system) as appropriate should help. Cheers, Roy.
