Continuous Hard Disk Activity-files touched every 2 seconds.

[emeskay]

Ever since I installed SuSE 9.1, my hard drive light flashes once every 2 seconds or so. The find utility reports that there are around 1000+ files whose modification time falls within the minute. Almost all these files are 0 bytes so I'm not sure what this really means. Perhaps they are just being "touched". There are some (about 2 dozen) non-empty files that show up as being modified - most of them in /proc or proc/bus/pci or in /dev. Note that these are files that are supposedly being modified (not just accessed).

I find this a bit unnerving. I only use the system for personal work, and going on the internet, so this kind of activity seems rather gratuitous. Can anyone shed some light on this.

Having looked up some possible explanations for on the web, I tried using the noatime option in etc/fstab but that does not change anything. In any case as I mentioned, the files are modified - not merely accessed. I also tried powersave setting but that had no efect either. I originally had 128 MB of RAM which I increased to 256. That too made no difference.

Running top, shows that kdeinit is at the top most of the time. kdeinit has several subprocesses - kio_file, kio_http, artsd etc. Not sure if it has anything to do with this.

NOTE: When I first installed the system, I had noticed that it was causing problems with my NT installation leading me to disable ACPI. Please have a look at the last two posts (#52 and #53) on THIS page.

Regards,
SKM

[variant]

I can think of a few sugestions that might help this..

1. strip all the cards out of your pc (except display) and turn it on.. if the problem is gone then begin re-insterting the hardware one at a time and testing the os.

2. remove kde.

[emeskay]

The only cards are sound card and network card. I doubt it is the sound card. Also it is installed as a "stand-alone" system so there are no network services running. I shutdown as many processes as I could from the taskbar and these are the remaining:

PID TTY TIME CMD
1 ? 00:00:05 init

• 2 ? 00:00:00 ksoftirqd/0
  3 ? 00:00:00 events/0
  [list:24a6b2ec3a]
  4 ? 00:00:00 kblockd/0
  6 ? 00:00:00 khelper
  7 ? 00:00:00 pdflush
  8 ? 00:00:00 pdflush
  10 ? 00:00:00 aio/0
  629 ? 00:00:00 reiserfs/0
  1044 ? 00:00:00 kcopyd

9 ? 00:00:00 kswapd0
5 ? 00:00:00 kapmd
174 ? 00:00:00 kseriod
1854 ? 00:00:00 khubd
2189 ? 00:00:00 syslogd
2195 ? 00:00:00 klogd
2277 ? 00:00:00 portmap
2278 ? 00:00:00 resmgrd
2641 ? 00:00:00 sshd
2779 ? 00:00:00 hwscand
2806 ? 00:00:00 powersaved
3114 ? 00:00:00 cupsd
3276 ? 00:00:00 master

• 3291 ? 00:00:00 pickup
  3292 ? 00:00:00 qmgr

3501 ? 00:00:00 nscd
3510 ? 00:00:00 cron
3709 ? 00:00:00 kdm

• 3730 ? 00:00:04 X
  3761 ? 00:00:00 kdm
  [list:24a6b2ec3a]
  3783 ? 00:00:00 kde
  [list:24a6b2ec3a]
  3864 ? 00:00:00 kwrapper

[/list:u:24a6b2ec3a][/list:u:24a6b2ec3a]
3763 tty1 00:00:00 mingetty
3764 tty2 00:00:00 mingetty
3765 tty3 00:00:00 mingetty
3766 tty4 00:00:00 mingetty
3767 tty5 00:00:00 mingetty
3768 tty6 00:00:00 mingetty
3845 ? 00:00:00 kdeinit

• 3850 ? 00:00:00 kdeinit
  3861 ? 00:00:00 artsd
  3867 ? 00:00:00 kdeinit
  3880 ? 00:00:00 kdeinit
  3888 ? 00:00:00 kdeinit
  3897 ? 00:00:01 kdeinit
  [list:24a6b2ec3a]
  3898 pts/1 00:00:00 bash
  [list:24a6b2ec3a]
  3906 pts/1 00:00:00 ps

[/list:u:24a6b2ec3a][/list:u:24a6b2ec3a]
3848 ? 00:00:00 kdeinit
3853 ? 00:00:00 kdeinit
3863 ? 00:00:00 kdeinit
3866 ? 00:00:00 kdeinit
3869 ? 00:00:00 kdeinit
3872 ? 00:00:00 kdeinit
3873 ? 00:00:01 kdeinit
3875 ? 00:00:01 kdeinit[/list:u:24a6b2ec3a]

[emeskay]

OK, I found the culprit. Liitle beast by the name of suseplugger which lies awake at night worrying about whether you are about to install some new hardware. Turned it off and set it to not startup at boot time. Hard drive is now resting peacefully.

Is there a configuration file which specify the applications that must start up on boot - just for future reference.

Now, however, I've noticed another strange problem. The susehelpcenter application takes about 3 minutes to start up.

Regards,
SKM.

[drakebasher]

Check the manual page for the file /etc/inittab:

%  man inittab

and see the directories under /etc/rc.d/ . Also try Googling "Linux boot process" or something similar, for example.