[ubuntu-uk] Churning hard disk, glacial startup

[Lucy]

2009/6/21 Matthew Daubney <matt at daubers.co.uk>:
> On Sun, 2009-06-21 at 08:29 +0100, Paul Webster wrote:
>> Hi (again)! I'm a relative newcomer to Ubuntu, a refugee from the
>> Windows Wonderland, and I like it very much. However, lately the hard
>> disk churns and churns, almost all the time, and startup is very slow.
>> Even writing this email has taken a long time, because sometimes
>> everything else comes to a halt.
>>
>> Please, somebody, help!
>>
>> Paul
>
>
> Hi Paul,
>
> There's a couple of places to look to find the rogue process. First have
> a look in top (open a terminal, type top) and that should give you a
> list of everything that's eating your resources. If it's HD thats being
> eaten, install iotop (open a terminal sudo apt-get install iotop) and
> then run it (in a terminal type iotop) and that will tell you what's
> using all of your IO.
>
> Have a look at those, see if you can identify whats eating your HD, then
> report back and we'll see what we can do :)

For a graphical alternative, go to the System menu -> Administration
-> System Monitor.

This will obviously be slower to do than running 'top' from the
command line but may be easier to understand.