what tool to find what's writing to disk

[Gary W. Swearingen]

"Darryl Clarke" <smartssa at gmail.com> writes:

> On 4/15/06, Gary W. Swearingen <garys at opusnet.com> wrote:
>>
>> It looks like "pdflush" is the culprit.  Seems to me a memory cleanup
>> daemon.  I'll be suprised if that's designed-in behavior, but I'll do
>> some Googling.
>
> It's not a daemon, it's a part of the kernel.

It's a process that runs in the background doing stuff forever.
How's that not a daemon?

> It's activity is directly related to system usage.  It only hits your
> disk if you use swap space.  The more swap used, the more it will hit
> your disk.

I've got 512 MB RAM and am running a few standard apps.  Having my
disk written to a couple times a second 24/7 is broken.  I'm not even
happy using a journaling FS that apparently needs to write every 5
seconds 24/7.