Ubuntu :: System Unreponsive During Disk Activity (9.10)?
Mar 15, 2010
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
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Jan 12, 2011
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?
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Oct 18, 2010
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?
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Mar 6, 2010
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
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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.
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Feb 27, 2011
My system decided to crash on me, hard. It was humming along happily for about 2 months and now doesn't boot. If I boot from hard-disk, I get grub. Launching the first kernel choice hangs. I thought maybe the install was corrupt, so I booted from usb install disk. The usb hdd didn't boot; something about an error trying to access /dev/sda . Unplugging the internal disk and plugging in the usb install disk does result in the system booting. Plugging in the internal disk in a running system usb-booted system does not result in the system detecting the disk.
How do I know if the disk is physically broken? This seems unlikely since it does manage to launch grub consistently. Or is this still possible? How can I try to mount whatever is left? The usb install disk doesn't even list the /dev/sd*. Any pointers on how to reformat the drive if it's not being mounted?
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May 30, 2011
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
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Feb 18, 2011
kernel 2.6.21.5, Slackware 12.0 How can I obtain real time information about disk activity (processes transfering data to/from the hard disk)?
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Nov 12, 2010
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.
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Dec 15, 2009
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.
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Feb 22, 2010
I am working on a program lets say programX which must run when the computer is not in use. I want to develop a monitoring program to monitor if there is user activity on the system so that it can stop the programX from running when the user is using the system and start programX when there is no user activity. Is there a way to determine this in linux?
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Jan 17, 2010
My system started running at 75 % CPU (its normally 20%), so I opened a terminal and looked at 'top', there are many processes running as root, the one thats sucking the CPU is this:'user'- root, 'pid'-2963, 'command'-X. below that there are a few processes of my user account, then alot more 'root' processes.
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Feb 8, 2010
System activity monitoring tools - top, iotop, ntop, sar, collectl, etc - may be a good reference to judge the system activity when the system transitions to sleep state.But if I make the system transition to sleep state when i/o activity is zero during 15 minutes, for example, it won't sleep forever because slight i/o by daemons, etc occurs continuously even if no user i/o.So how can I judge the system activity to change the state by using those tools?
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Dec 15, 2010
I have an auditing problem. I am required to be able to track user account modifications (creates, deletes, password changes, etc.) My team and I implemented auditd 1.7.17 and borrowed an existing rule set from /usr/share/doc/audit-1.7.17/nispom.rules. What we're seeing is that user account activity from the command line is retrievable by doing an 'aureport -m'. However, doing the same through the GUI, 'aureport -m' does not display the activity. So I have two questions:1. Is there another location I should be looking to find the user creation activities when using the GUI?2. Is there a way to make the activity using the GUI be captured in /var/log/audit/audit.log so 'aureport -m' can report it?Someone suggested a PAM configuration change, but was not able to tell me what change to make.
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Oct 12, 2010
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?
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Jul 14, 2011
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
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Aug 8, 2010
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.
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Apr 24, 2010
I'm running Slackware 13 with a custom kernel based off of 2.6.32.3. I tend to leave my system on 24/7, as well as my web browser. Originally it was Firefox and now it is Google's Chrome. Usually about a day of leaving the web browser open my HD activity spikes so high that I can barely do anything on the system until I kill the web browser. This has been happening with both Firefox AND Chrome! As soon as the browser processes are killed, the system returns back to normal.
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Aug 21, 2011
I tried to do a scheduled software update several times today (8/20/11) and nothing seems to download, though I do get the "Downloading" PackageKit dialog message (the System Monitor shows practically no network activity). In between tries I downloaded some 600 MB .iso files (about 10 minutes each) so I know my internet is working properly. That leaves either PackageKit got hosed in my last update, or servers are down.
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Apr 9, 2010
This is the third 9.10 install to do this on two different laptops, so wondering what's up...
In both cases, the goal was to leave a large chunk of unpartitioned disk after the Ubuntu partitions, for a second OS install or a filesystem Ubuntu cannot create like NTFS.
When I install with manual partitions, the system can't boot and asks for me to insert a system disk and press any key. When I reinstall telling Ubuntu to "use the entire disk" it then works.
First laptop, first try:
Remainder of the 500GB disk is free space.
Fails to boot, "insert system disk".
First laptop, second try without the /boot partition:
Remainder of the 500GB disk is free space.
Fails to boot, "insert system disk".
"use entire disk" works perfectly.
Second laptop, first try:
Same thing, non-system disk or disk error, insert system disk.
Second try "use entire disk" is currently in progress but I expect the same to happen.
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Apr 2, 2011
i have auto login and a ultra simple admin password, so it wasn't hard for them to mess with stuff...so when i came home i see that they had gone into terminal and added something to my system. i cant recall what it was because as soon as i saw in the history "warning this will make permanent changes to your system do you want to proceed" and the falling yes i got up and started bitching out my roommate and when i was gone someone had closed terminal. i was wondering is there is a way to search my recent terminal activity to see what was done so i can then find out if i can fix what was done?. or is there another option i should look into?
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Aug 1, 2010
I had done a new lucid install to a 1 TB RAID 1 array using the alternate CD a few weeks back. I messed up that system trying to some hardware working that lucid doesn't have drivers for yet, so I gave up on it and reinstalled to a single 80 GB disk that I now want to move over to the RAID array.
I moved all of the existing files on the array to a single folder, then copied all of the folders from the 80 GB disk over to the array with permissions and symlinks (minus the contents of /proc and /sys, which I created empty).
These are the commands I used:
Quote:
p -a -d -R -v -t /media/raid_array /b*
cp -a -d -R -v -t /media/raid_array /d*
cp -a -d -R -v -t /media/raid_array /e*
cp -a -d -R -v -t /media/raid_array /h*
[Code]....
I tried to change fstab to use the 689a... for root, but when I try to boot, it's still trying to open /dev/disk/by-uuid/412d...
So then I booted from the single disk again and chrooted into the array, then ran update-initramfs -u. I got 3 "grep: /proc/modules: No such file or directory" errors, and "cat: /proc/cmdline: No such file or directory"- so I created directory /proc/modules, created an empty file /proc/cmdline, and ran the initramfs update again. Then I tried to shut down, which hung (probably because I was doing all of this from a terminal window in Gnome), so I killed the power after a couple of minutes.
It's still trying to use /dev/disk/by-uuid/412d... to boot.
What am I missing? I assume I just have to change the UUID to mount as root, but I don't know how.
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Oct 19, 2010
i am investigating on solutions to trace a file deletion on a computer( Linux O/S).i also need to determine weither after a file deletion or download on a computer, the computer clock had not been modified. In case a file has been downloaded on a computer and then transferred to a removable device, i need to find out the file activity. i mean i should be able to tell that the file was downloaded and transferred to a device with possible specifications.
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Apr 29, 2011
Is it possible to install GRUB in the MBR of the only bootable disk in the system, but load configuration and images from another disk?Basically I want to install GRUB on /dev/sda, but menu and images will be under /dev/sdb2.Note: /dev/sdb is not bootable.
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Jan 22, 2011
After installation of debian, using the squeeze net-installer, on a HP elitebook 6930P, i get the following error. "non-system disk or disk error"
It is right after boot process, and just when it should load grub. Grub is installed in the MBR. Windows7, is installed as well, and is not an option to remove. (Should not be the problem though).
/ is set with the bootable flag.
The installation went without any issues, and I have actually tried to install twice with the exact same thing.
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Jan 2, 2010
My dual proc, dual core Opteron MSI Master2FAR motherboard failed, and I try to boot a disk, used on this board as boot disk, on an Intel based Gigabyte GA-965-DS3. Both systems are x86_64 architecture.
The OS is on both systems is openSUSE 11.1.
On booting the disk on the Gigabyte, the disk is seen correctly by the BIOS, but not by the OS, and there is no /dev/sdX; no /dev/disk/... either. I am taken to a login shell from the ramdisk.
When I just mount this disk on the Gigabyte (booted with the Gigabyte's original boot disk) everything seems fine. No suprise to me, since the disk was fine, and was unmounted gracefully and physically taken off the MSI before the board failed.
I think that the cause lies in the fact that the harddisk controller on the Gigabyte is different from the MSI, and the driver for that controller is not available at boot time.
I have two questions:
- is my assumption correct, or is something else going on?
- if I am right, is there a way to get this disk booting on the Gigabyte (or on another system, for that matter)?
You might want to ask why I want to boot this disk on the Gigabyte in the first place, since I can mount it and see all data on it. I have a reason for that, but telling that story would make this topic too long, and it's too off-topic. Most certainly I will get to that in another topic.
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Oct 17, 2010
I have windows and linux distros on my /dev/sda. I tried to install fedora 13, but after reboot I cannot boot up to any of installed systems. I'm getting: Non-System disk or disk errorreplace and striky any key when readyWhen I use ubuntu 10, boot from first hard disk, I'm able to get GNU GRUB version 1.98...nd boot up to any system. but without ubuntu in a cd-rom I'm getting this error.I tried: grub-install /dev/sdX in one of my installed linux distros, but without any success.
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Oct 28, 2010
Booted up system and it stated please insert system disk press any key.So it sounds like my startup got corrupted? I running centos 4.5 on it (old yes) Is there a repair I can perform by a disk? Would it matter if I chose i386 or x86? I cant remeber which version was installed on it.
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Apr 12, 2010
I'm using 9.10 Desktop 64bit on a Dell Latitude D830. I have 4 gigs of RAM and a 7200 rpm sata hard drive. Everything works pretty well, video, sound, and network. Flash isn't as smooth as in Windows but I assume that's a Flash/64bit thing and not necessarily an Ubuntu thing.
However, one area of performance still lags far behind my Windows XP experience, and that's disk writes. For instance, when I'm copying a large amount of information from a USB drive or from my Windows partition to my native partition, I can barely switch windows until the task is complete, nevermind trying to surf the Web. I thought that that might be related to the slow performance of the ntfs driver, but recently I have been doing a lot of work with VMWare, and I get the same result when trying to pause virtual machines - it writes a largish amount of information to disk in a short amount of time and I can't do much until it finishes.
Here are some things I looked at based on other threads to try to debug my issue:
~$ sudo hdparm /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
multcount = 8 (on)
IO_support = 1 (32-bit)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
[Code].....
That disk read speed is a little faster than average - several more tests showed it hovering around the 66 MB/sec range. Of the other info, I see that UDMA is on which I understand is good, but if there is something else there that I should fix I don't see it.
I know that my computer can handle these tasks (at least the vmware stuff) without such a significant interface slowdown because in XP I did it with less RAM than I have now. Is this just the way that the linux kernel scheduler fails to account for UI needs?
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Jun 19, 2010
When I do some copying of files, or any background disk activity with file reading (transcoding a movie, uploading a big file to FTP, virus scanning) all computer becomes so slow, that I hardly can move my mouse, not to mention any productive use. I have SATA HDD, and Intel Quad CPU. I took measures to be sure it is not CPU or memory resource problem. Gentoo, Fedora, Windows don't freese that much on file reading. It is not a filesystem problem, or HDD, cuse I tried exactly this partition with other OSes.
Nice has a minor effect, but is is not enough, and I can't always start Nautilus with another nice level when I want to copy a file. What can I do to lower the priority of disk operations globally, and make apps to share disk thoughtput equally, not the one to occupie the disk until it finishes?
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