Disk chatter every 5 seconds

[Daniel Allen]

Thanks. I've checked /var/log/* and nothing's updating at that
frequency.  I also neglected to mention that I unset APM (hdparm -B
255) on the one drive that supported it.  I'm not sure if there are
other hdparm settings that might be helpful here; googling didn't seem
to find anything.

As you suggested, I updated /etc/fstab; I ran mount -o remount noatime
, but no change...

-Daniel

On 12/18/05, Scott J. Henson <scotth at csee.wvu.edu> wrote:
> Daniel Allen wrote:
>
> >Ubuntu (5.04 and 5.10) seem to run a device-related daemon (HALd?
> >udev?) which makes the disk activate in a short burst exactly every 5
> >seconds.  Since the disk is the loudest part of my home system, the
> >pattern is sometimes a bit distracting.
> >
> >Anybody know what's the cause, and whether it's configurable behavior?
> > I have done a bit of poking, but I haven't been able to isolate it,
> >beyond that it doesn't happen in runlevel 2, and it doesn't stay
> >active long enough to show up in 'top'.
> >
> >
> That 5 seconds sounds an aweful lot like the 5 second commit interval
> that ext3fs has.  So its not hald or udev directly.  Its probably
> something doing some logging or something else.  You may also think your
> not writting anything to disk, but every you access a file the atime
> must be updated, so that needs to be written to disk.  On my laptop I
> set the noatime option on all my partitions.  This will keep it from
> updating that.  Also you should check in /var/log to see if anything is
> writting too much to disk and see if you can scilence it.  Generally
> setting the noatime mount option fixes it.  You can set this in
> /etc/fstab.  Man mount for a full description of this option.
>
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