[ltp] noflushd

[Marius Gedminas]

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On Thu, Apr 22, 2004 at 04:47:46PM -0500, Justin Georgeson wrote:
> I have 2 partitions with data, / and /boot, both formatted ext3. I=20
> installed noflushd and it did power down the driver, but within 5=20
> minutes it started a cycle of powering up and down with just a few=20
> minutes between each. I imagine this is bad for the drive so I disabled=
=20
> noflushd. I forget what I set the timeout to, but it was definitely=20
> between 5 and 15 minutes, so it seems like it was powering down to=20
> quickly. There are two things I have in consideration, reformatting=20
> (perhaps just remounting) with ext2 in case journaling is screwing with=
=20
> noflushd, and adding memory.

Journaling is screwing with noflushd.  And with laptop-mode, which I
recommend.

You have to remount your ext3 partitions with a longer commit interval,
e.g.

  mount / -o remount,commit=3D600

will wake up your disk drive every 10 minutes.  Using noatime mount
option could also help.  I think it would be a good idea to mount /boot
readonly.

> Right now I'm running debian unstable using=20
> gnome, and only have 128 MB of memory, so it swaps quite a bit.

Swapping will definitely wake up the disk.

I have 256 MB of memory, and I do not use GNOME.  IceWM (which is pretty
lightweight), and a couple of Mozillas are enough to cause occasional
swapping with 256 MB of RAM.  I disabled swap once when I was playing
with laptop-mode, and was rewarded with 'VM killing process XFree86' in
ten minutes.

HTH,
Marius Gedminas
--=20
Did you know that 7/5 people don't know how to use fractions?

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