Ubuntu :: Constant Disk Activity - Light Flashes About Twice Per Second
Apr 6, 2011
I understand that Ubuntu typically has some disk activity even when idle, but I believe that I have a problem that I am worried is affecting my disk drive - which has recently become quite loud. The system disk activity light flashes about twice per second, all the time, when idle. iostat shows a Blk_wrtn/s of between 10 and 40. I am running Lucid x64. The system disk uses ext4 for root and ext4 for /home. The disk activity starts before I even log in. There is no disk activity if I drop to the root shell in recovery mode - as seen by no flashing light and iostat writes = 0. I have tried killing my media server processes, Mediatomb and Squeezeboxserver. I have unmounted the ntfs data drive. There is nothing else running beyond the vanilla install to my recollection other the services above that I stopped. How can I determine which process is causing the constant writing? I do not have this issue on my laptop which is running Karmic, and as I mentioned earlier, I think this non-stop activity is damaging my drive.
I posted this on Launchpad under bug# 569445 and though I'm certain someone in our heroic development community will have a look at it eventually, maybe someone can help me here in the meantime, or at least provide some background info. Maybe a little reassurance that Ubuntu isn't broken for my Wifi is all I need.
Quote:
Binary package hint: wireless-crda I do hope I've picked the right package for this. Investigators, feel free to email me with whatever bash commands you need me to find out more about the hardware. The problem is that wireless in Lucid is dying for me after about a minute or so, and the activity light on my netbook just flashes. The wireless monitor at the top of the screen still thinks it's connected. It's like it's out of sync or something.
This doesn't happen under Win7 on this hardware, nor does it happen to other devices in my house on the network. Also, I wasn't having this problem under Lucid Beta 1 I have an Acer Aspire (Olympic Variant) 1410 Win7 reports the adapter as Intel WiFi Link 1000 BGN The wireless router I'm using is a DLink DIR-628. The connection is OPEN.
I'm using Lucid on a laptop, (details in sig). Often after I've been running Ubuntu for a while, like a few hours, my HD activity light will come on and not stop, causing my machine to become laggy. (A link might open 3-5 seconds I click on it, typing appears a second after I press the key, a window or dropdown menu might take 5-10 seconds to be drawn.) I currently have Firefox with one tab and a Nautilus window open. Conky says the CPU is running at 10-20%, RAM is almost all used, (I assume Firefox's cache is filling up, since I've been surfing for a while), and swap is around 25% full. I just turned Compiz & Emerald off, but the HD is still spinning away. At this point, I usually log out and in again, or reboot. I though slowing performance with usage, resource-hogging background processes and constant rebooting were Windoze traits! What gives?Apparently, this is caused by Update Manager. Unbeknownst to me, Update Manager was waiting for me to give it the go-ahead, but while it's open, instead of patiently waiting, it renders my computer unusably slow, even though it's not supposed to be doing anything.
I am still new to linux and just installed opensuse 11.1 and all was fine untill I went to yast, software and ran the online update. Now when I boot up linux it takes a long time and after suse is booted up the HDD led is constant. I did know enough to add VGA=normal in grub and this is what is is displayed when it hangs:
<6>ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x9f0 ctl 0xbf0 bmdma 0xd800 irq 21 <6>ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x970 ctl 0xb70 bmdma 0xd808 irq 21 <4>ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=-19) <3>ata1: SRST failed (errno=-16) <6>ata1: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300) <4>ata1: link online but device misclassified, retrying ..... <4>ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [ASA1] enabled at IRQ 20 <6>sata_nv 0000:00:0e.1: PCI INT B -> Link[ASA1] -> GSI 20 (level, low) -> IRQ 20 <5>sata_nv 0000:00:0e.1: Using SWNCQ mode <7>sata_nv 0000:00:0e.1: setting latency timer to 64
It looks like it has something to do with the HDD. I Have 2 HDD's in the computer with linux on the second drive. I also noticed that before updating I could access my ntfs partitions in nautilus and now they do not show up and are not in my fstab file and I do not know how to add them back in.
Just after I boot up I get this wierd HDD activity that lasts for some time during which my system runs at snail Pace and or Hangs. After a while the activity stops and things are good and then randomly it all starts again. I have read some forum post on constant HDD activity but they do not seem to apply to my problem. I am Running 11.3 with a quad core AMD 64bit CPU and 4GB of memory.
I just installed Fedora 13 on my HP HDX 16 laptop (and accidentally corrupted my vista partition by resizing it so I'm pretty much stuck now. ^_^)
The light for the wifi toggle button constantly flashes between blue and orange (normally meaning the wifi card is on or off). Does anybody know how I can fix this?
I had a problem with the new network manager a week ago and got it solved with help from the forum so now I'm back again. I have a dual boot with Windows 7 (I have to use it when serving my corporate masters) so I wasn't in my Fedora partition much this week. I just noticed this and I'm positive it wasn't doing it before my network manager problem but I'm not sure when it started or if they're related. I'm running F15. The machine is an HP Elitebook 8440p and has a wifi light that is also a touch button to turn the wireless on/off. Whenever there is activity on the network now it blinks between orange and blue. I know that isn't really a big deal but it's really annoying and is driving me completely nuts!! The normal behavior is orange when it's off, solid blue when it's on (or connected) and blinks orange/blue just while it's connecting. During network activity it's always been just solid blue and that's what I want. I found a script that some Ubuntu users said fixed the same problem but when I tried to copy it the directory they said to put it in "/etc/network/ifup.d" doesn't exist. I'm assuming that's a distro difference between Ubuntu and Fedora? Has anyone else seen this? Any ideas how to fix it?
I have Karmic installed on three different computers (work, home and laptop), but on my home desktop there is a strange performance problem. During disk activity it sometimes becomes completely unresponsive. The mouse cursor doesn't even move. It actually seems fine when it first boots up, but it gradually gets worse as I use the computer for a while until it eventually becomes completely unusable. I'm only having trouble on the one system.The drive in the system is SATA, and I already checked to make sure DMA was on. It is a x86_64 kernel.I tried adding noapic to the kernel boot line after some googling, but it seemed to have no effect
I have something that is poling my hard drive about every two seconds. It's really not necessary I don't think. I am not sure how to find out what process it is. My memory usage is pretty low and I am not using any swap.How do I go about tracking the culprit down?
I recently switched to 64-bit Karmic after installing extra memory. I have everything working fine, but I am experiencing an annoying lag in keyboard and mouse response whenever any of the CPU cores briefly jumps to 100% usage, which tends to happen every 10 to 15 seconds, usually caused by firefox.
I'll be typing or scrolling, and there is fairly regularly a hesitation of a second or two in which nothing happens on-screen, and then everything catches up again, ie the keyboard buffer empties to screen or the page scrolls a lot.
I've tried changing the Nvidia driver and the disk iosched elevator, which were the only ideas I could find when searching on this issue.
It seems to me that (a) the CPU usage shouldn't be jumping up like that, and (b) even if it does, it shouldn't affect keyboard an mouse activity to such an extent. This only started happening after switching from 32-bit to 64-bit Karmic.
SYSTEM SPECS Intel Q6600 2.4GHz quad-core CPU Gigabyte EP45-UD3L motherboard (P45 chipset) 6 GB memory Disk space: 2x 250GB drives + 1500GB RAID5 Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit Linux 2.5.31-20 kernel
So I wanted to install Ubuntu 11.04 on my ASUS 900a that only has 4GB of disk space. Of course Ubuntu 11.04 requires 4.4GB, so I started looking for alternatives.I tried to get Lubuntu 11.04, but when I ran the installation process it states that 5GB are required. Not very light weight IMHO if this is the case.I was hoping that someone had an idea of how to install a strippted version of Ubuntu 11.04 (maybe without some of the apps like the LibreOffice Suite) or knew why Lubuntu was asking for so much hard drive space.I'm hoping to move away from my light-weight version of WinXP.
I followed the guideline 'How to use PreUpgrade' to upgrade F14 -> F15. What happened was that after reboot: 1. The screen was a mess ... no readable information 2. No reaction on pressing 'return' 3. The disk led showed no activity, so I reseted the computer after 5 minutes inactivity. The system came up but with F14. I repeated the 'preupgrade' and all messages are in [URL]... but still F14 comes up after reboot. Where have I missed ... eager to get F15
For about 15 minutes or so after login on my FreeBSD 8.1 (yes, I know its not Linux) the hard drive goes absolutely crazy with activity. So much so that it takes a while for the ls command to read the contents of the directory. But after the 15 minutes or so the disk activity calms down and returns to normal.
Im thinking it is some sort of fsck command, but I am unsure where or how to disable it. The hard drive is connected via sata to the mobo. Im not quite sure what other info I can post to find out what is going on. Just tell me what other info is needed and Ill post it up.
I keep noticing disk activity every roughly 1 to 3 seconds even though there is "nothing" going on. Of course, I run a number of "system" and "user" application packages - Apache2, MySQL, Browsers (Opera, IceWeasel), an SMB client and server, OpenOffice 3.0RC8 being the most prominent ones. I wonder what might be the cause for this constant disk activity which happens even when none of the applications do any noticeable work at all. Is there a way to determine the process that does those disk read/writes?
I attempted to do the upgrade from 11 to 12 with the Preupgrade Assistant. Unfortunatly something went terribly wrong. Everything went well, excluding the size of partition error, untill the reboot. I did have to remove two previous installs. Now grub gives me an option to upgrade to Fedora 12. When I select this the screen runs code quickly and the screen goes blank with alot of disk activity. Then nothing. Is there a method of recovering this install? I am fairly new to Linux Administration and I am just knowledgable enough to mess things up.
My Ubuntu system is occasionally becoming very sluggish. I'm running many things simultaneously and it's very difficult to tell which program is the culprit.
I suspect that the sluggishness is due to disk activity since the CPU usage is consistently under 50% on each of the 4 cores of the CPU, and over 30% of the 6GB of RAM are free.
Is there a tool that can show me in real time the number of disk IO operations per second and the amount of data read/written per second? Can all this info be broken down and displayed per process?
Just the last day or so, I've noticed a long pause when I boot my laptop, with lots of disk activity. dmesg says:
[Code]...
Why would there be a 15-second pause (during which the disk is slammed) between mounting root and mounting swap? During this time I see nothing but a blank purple screen, there are no cycling dots or text scroll. Is this normal and I'm just freaking out over nothing because there's no indicator of progress? GRUB default boot options: quiet splash nomodeset video=uvesafb:mode_option=1920x1200-24,mtrr=3,scroll=ywrap vt.handoff=7
My mouse flickers in and out when I move it and a small pix elated square surrounds it. I can still click and highlight and preform mouse actions. I was playing about in the Appearance settings and I had come over to the mouse pad of the custom theme window. I tried changing the mouse and it only changed some icons of the mouse. To make it work and show all the new icons for the cursor, i used this command:
I then changed "Inherits=DMZ-White" to "Inherits=DMZ-Black". I logged out and back in and that's when my problem started. It shows the new mouse but i have that glitchy square and it flickers. I've tried switching back but it didn't change anything.
This is my sons Asus eee pc 1005peb ( have one exactly like it and never happened to me)
The screen flashes on bootup and makes it very hard if not impossible to login and the gnome menu at the top is gone too. I do not know what he did to it. But I am loading meego on it now.
My laptop running ubuntu 9.10 load NEVER drops below 1, and generally hovers between 1 and 2. This does not happen on any other of my ubuntu machines.
Any ideas of what to check? I've turned off indexing and watched system monitor. I always sit at 0% cpu usage, no active apps, but always a high load.
Attached is a screenshot showing top (with the load).
In my system monitors up top you can see the middle one in red, which is load. Constantly 1-2. The left one is cpu (almost no usage at all) right right one is disk IO.
HD operations indicator-lite flashes every second, on all my hd's..? What is the OS doing?.. Is this a security breach?.. Does this mean that my files are being uploaded at about 10K per second..? Or is this just a software checking status every second..? What does what, that engages the hd every second..?
I have installed matlab 7.9 in ubuntu 9.10. I tried to launch it on the desktop using launcher. But as I double click on it it flashes but its not opening. After seeing previous posts somewhere it is given that matlab-desktop should be used. But I am not clear where to use it. How to create a desktop icon for matlab. It got solved by adding -desktop at the end of command.
When I load Ubuntu, it goes to the desktop screen, shows my desktop picture, loads Pidgin which I have set to start on startup, loads Icons, and then the screen goes black. The mouse cursor shows up, I can move it around, and then it goes black again, and the mouse cursor shows up again. This repeats a few times until the cursor freezes. This started happening after I tried fixing a bug with new drivers for my Intel 845gl video card. The instructions I followed are these:
Code: To use the available fix, run the following commands: pt-add-repository ppa:glasen/855gm-fix apt-add-repository ppa:brian-rogers/graphics-fixes apt-add-repository ppa:glasen/intel-driver aptitude update aptitude install linux 855gm-fix-dkms aptitude dist-upgrade ,taken from here.
I have tried some of the options in recovery mode from GRUB menu, none really work, except booting with default graphic configuration, or something similar like this.
when attempting to boot ubuntu, an error message flashed, and my computer restarted. This happens every time I choose "Ubuntu" on the loader. The error flashes to quick to read, but I think the first line is something like
Code: Try: error
how I can slow down the error message, or, even better, fix it?
I'm on 10.04. 64bit (but dont think this is 64bit related)
I have been getting this very annoying error while trying to burn DVD-DL media from an iso using growisofs. Here is the command I used (to burn a backup copy of an xbox360 game)
Code: growisofs -use-the-force-luke=dao -use-the-force-luke=break:1913760 -dvd-compat -speed=2.4 -Z /dev/scd0=nameofmyiso.iso Now, every single time, usually around 50%, I get this error:
I've been searching around and found threads with people complaining about this error since 2005, but not a single one of them presented any solution (some hint to a kernel issue, which I'd have no idea how to fix. I'm a noob at linux).
I also tried burning it using imgburn under wine, same error, also at 50%.
This is very frustrating, Ive burned around 6 coasters so far and DVD-DL are expensive to keep on this trial and error.
p.s It's not faulty media before anyone asks. I tried it on Mac and it worked fine. Also, this drive worked well before, before I migrated this machine.
i just upgraded from 10.10 to 11.04 and am using the "classic" gnome 2 interface. i have an ati card, currently powered by the standard fglrx drivers. something must be wrong with compositing, because when i mouse over avant window navigator, indicators, menus, drag files, etc, there is a good (but still random) chance of it breaking my display.
just for the record, i have tried this with the newest catalyst drivers from the official website, the fglrx drivers from the repository and without any fglrx drivers at all. i am running a patched version of emerald that works with the included compiz, but i still get the same crashes with metacity's window decorator and without avant window navigator. indicator menus will just crash the screen from gnome-panel.
i had also gotten this same problem in a previous natty install using unity.
edit: hmm, disabling compiz seems to keep the crashes at bay, so i think this is a (major) compiz bug. does anyone know which logs i should include in my bug report?
My dads' hard drive went up a while back. So we got him a new one and installed Ubuntu 9.10 instead of windows. All was going well until About two weeks ago. The system restarts randomly. Not when anyone is doing anything in particular. Sometimes when we are using firefox, sometimes just sitting on the desktop, and never after any certain amount of time.Some times its after five minutes, some times after several hours. It's not a full out crash, the window for shutdown/switch user/restart comes up out of nowhere. When we close the window, it shows back up pretty quickly, but then the computer will just crash. While restarting, half of the time the computer won't make it past the bios screen before restarting again,and will continue the bios restarting cycle until the computer is unplugged. By the way, the system is a dell dimension E310 from 2005 with all of the original hardware minus hard drive inside, so if it is a hardware issue that wouldn't surprise me. Also, just one time after the restart I received the message "fsck from util-linux-ng 2.16" , if that helps at all.
When I hit the Pulse Audio Device Chooser icon and then click on 'Volume Control' the volume control GUI flashes on for long enough for me to realise it has flashed on and then is gone again! If I run the chooser as root from a terminal (sudo padevchooser) I get this response when I hit the error:
Strange thing is, I have spent a lot of time working on my wife's laptop and Pulse Audio was working great (after many brain twisting, hair ripping hours of working on it) and indeed is still working despite the lack of GUI. This is all good except I want to change the output device for ringing in Skype and this is where I need to 'Move Stream ...' and can't get to it.
