My hard drive seems to be showing signs of excessive activity even when the system is idle. I would like to see what is causing all that activity. I have used iotop before on other systems for this analysis but the package doesn't appear in either the core or extra repositories for LinHES 7.4.

How would I go about installing iotop in a LinHES 7.4 system without risking damage to my installation by introducing some other repositories?

Gus

Open a feature request: http://www.linhes.org/projects/linhes/issues/new

I guess I don't really need a package. iotop is a Python program that runs easily from a users directory. I got the tarball here:

http://guichaz.free.fr/iotop/

and just untarred and ran it from a directory off of my home directory.

Example, starting in the home directory:


With that information I find that [kjournald] seems to be doing most of the I/O followed by "runsv mythbackend". Not sure what is going on with that one, either some kind of polling or logging. I might investigate later.

I've noticed the same thing on my system. Haven't had a chance to try iotop yet to investigate (thanks for the instructions), but I can hear the hard drive head moving/seeking on a regular interval every 1-2 seconds. I'm pretty sure this was not happening on 7.0.x and started sometime around upgrading to 7.1 or 7.2. I wonder if it might be related to the new style/verbosity of LinHES logging?

Please post back if you find out anything else. I'd like to resolve it.

Well, for one, why not use the official Arch PKGBUILD for iotop and it installed properly? Does LinHES ship python2 as python?

To your question, look at the command that dictates mythfrontend's behavior. If this case it's the runit file for mythfrontend I think... if you're right, it very likely has a log file associated with mythfrontend (something like this, /usr/bin/mythfrontend -l /var/log/mythfrontend.log). You can either manually edit the service file and:

1) Remove the logfile
2) Find out where it is logging and make a symlink to tmpfs on the filesystem itself. For example if it is logging to /var/log/mythfrontend.log just stop the service, delete the logfile and issue this command before restarting it, `sudo ln -s /var/log/mythfrontend.log /dev/shm/mythfrontend.log`

_________________
Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.