For me the usual culprit is Time Machine which does a backup each hour
and makes things sludgy when it is running. I've also heard that the
'mds' process is Spotlight indexing the hard drive and that can slow
things down. Another problem is if you get low on memory the OS will
swap pages of memory that haven't been used recently out to disk to free
up more space. Then when you go back to an app that used those pages of
memory the OS will swap them back in. So if you're low on RAM there can
be a lot of page swapping or thrashing which can bring any system to a
crawl. Activity monitor only shows processes by CPU use, not by disk
activity, but sometimes those correlate. If you're ok with playing
around in terminal you can do
sudo iotop 10 1
sudo is "super user do" because this command can only be run by the root
account, so it should prompt for your administrator password. iotop is
like activity monitor but for disk activity. The first number is how
many seconds to sample. The second number is how many samples to do. If
you leave the second number off it will keep doing 10 second samples
until you stop it running with control-C. You should get a 9 column
output with spaces between each value. The last column is the number of
bytes read by the process during the sample period with the process with
the highest byte count last. You can do a "man iotop" for more details.
CB
On 12/11/12 10:45 AM, Paul Erkens wrote:
Dear listers,
My hard disk is working constantly, without me knowing what the heck it's
doing. To my knowledge, I don't have disk intensive background stuff
deliberately turned on. I know I'll have to get this from activity monitor, but
I don't know how to find the info I'm looking for. No matter how I sort the
table of processes, new ones are added all the time, while others get removed,
and so it is hard to focus on items inside the processes table with voiceover.
How do you deal with this? I.e.: finding out which process is using the hard
disk so intensively that it's getting hard to do work in the foreground?
Paul.
--
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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