[ltp] Hard disk shutdown

[Tod Harter]

Tino's suggestion is about the only one I can think of either. 256 mb RAM is 
plenty of RAM in my book for most purposes. I would think unless you are 
running a bunch of services that are memory-intensive you shouldn't be doing 
much swapping, certainly not when the system is idle. 

vmstat will give you a rundown on free memory (as will top), or any number of 
X equivalents. Its common to see a small amount of swap being in use even 
when no swapping is happening, but you should show SOME free physical memory.

On Monday 21 October 2002 04:48 pm, Tino Keitel wrote:
> *** List MOVED use linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org for future postings
> ***
>
> On Mon, 21 Oct 2002 22:02:27 +0200
>
> Ted Johansson <Ted.Johansson@pobox.com> wrote:
> > *** List MOVED use linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org for future
> > postings ***
> >
> > I have checked the /var/log/* files, and if some program writes to the
> > disk, the file date/times should reflect this, but no. I am not sure
> > how much ram is "too little", but there is 256 MB in my machine.
> >
> > Is there any other way to check what applicaitons access the disk. I
> > found disk I/O howto pages
> > (http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~mukesh/hacks/spindown/x152.html) but this
> > requires re-building the kernel, and I am not too happy about this,
> > however it is an option.
> >
> > Any suggestions what init.d daemons that may trigger disk access, and
> > I will try switching them off? I already tried turning autofs off, but
> > no difference.
>
> Look what processes are running using ps ax and kill them one by one (I
> would suggest to begin at the bottom of the list, not at the top :-) and
> wait a few minutes after each kill. If the disk doesn't spin up again,
> you have the guilty process.
>
> Regards,
> Tino