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I have an old implementation of Ubuntu 12.04. There are occasional spells of disk activity that go on for 5+ minutes during which the system is unuseable. I cant quite work out which process is responsible but it reminds me of the continual file indexing that used to take place on older versions of windows. Is it possible to change the way 12.04 indexes files in the background so that I can investigate if this is the cause ?

Thanks

David

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  • You can install iotop with sudo apt-get install iotop and run it during the problem with sudo iotop. It will sort running processes by disk I/O utilization.
    – Marios Zindilis
    Jun 3, 2015 at 10:38

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Are there any programs running while this is happening, i.e Firefox, Thunderbird, anything?

Also, its possible a cron job could be running in the background?

You might try opening a terminal, and using top to watch processes, see if there are any offending processes?

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  • Yes - Firefox is usually open at this time of disk activity.
    – David Billingham
    Jun 2, 2015 at 22:01
  • What amount of RAM do you have? I know in my case, Firefox, on first boot, does use a lot of resources, and then every subsequent close/open of FF works fine. I'm also working with 4Gb of ram, and usually won't use more than about 600 - 800Mb of RAM on FF when its on a graphics-intense web page.
    – Doug
    Jun 2, 2015 at 23:02
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I experienced freezes. In my case, I solved them in adjusting the swappiness :

echo vm.swappiness=5 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf echo vm.vfs_cache_pressure=50 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf sudo sysctl -p

The standard swappiness is set @60 (more suitable for servers than desktops), which means the swap can trigger @40% of ram usage. With the setup I use, it starts only @95% of ram usage and in my experience, reduces dramatically freeze occurences.

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  • Thanks - I'll give that a go. I've tried adjusting swappinesss already, but not at the aggressive values that you're using. I'll try it
    – David Billingham
    Jun 3, 2015 at 17:23
  • In addition, if you're using an adblocker, better choose ublock origin, much lighter than any others : addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/ublock-origin
    – nam1962
    Jun 4, 2015 at 10:12

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