what tool to find what's writing to disk

[Darryl Clarke]

On 4/17/06, Gary W. Swearingen <garys at opusnet.com> wrote:
> "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?

I personally don't really considering non interactive portions of the
kernel, that I can't arbitrarily control, to be daemons.  But as
others have stated, the kernel team calls it such. *shrug*

>
> > 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.

Best not to use any modern OS then.

Put your system in standby, suspend, or hibernate.  That'll stop the
the kernel from doing it's regularly scheduled job.

You _can_, however,  tweak these settings if you desire, adding a
'commit=X' in the mount options, where X is the time in seconds. And
for pdflush I'm not sure where but I'm pretty sure there's a way.  Ask
Google.

--
~ Darryl  ~ smartssa at gmail.com
~ http://darrylclarke.com