From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Sun Nov 21 16:17:57 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id EBAF216A4D2 for ; Sun, 21 Nov 2004 16:17:57 +0000 (GMT) Received: from pi.codefab.com (pi.codefab.com [199.103.21.227]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 97EE543DDA for ; Sun, 21 Nov 2004 15:50:54 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from cswiger@mac.com) Received: from [192.168.1.250] (pool-68-161-115-118.ny325.east.verizon.net [68.161.115.118]) by pi.codefab.com (8.12.11/8.12.11) with ESMTP id iALFom5M069154 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA bits=256 verify=NO) for ; Sun, 21 Nov 2004 10:50:50 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <41A0B955.8090700@mac.com> Date: Sun, 21 Nov 2004 10:50:45 -0500 From: Chuck Swiger Organization: The Courts of Chaos User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040910 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org References: <20041121093347.GA861@gicco.homeip.net> In-Reply-To: <20041121093347.GA861@gicco.homeip.net> X-Enigmail-Version: 0.86.1.0 X-Enigmail-Supports: pgp-inline, pgp-mime Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-4.5 required=5.5 tests=AWL,BAYES_00 autolearn=ham version=2.64 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.64 (2004-01-11) on pi.codefab.com Subject: Re: Tracing Disk Activity X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 21 Nov 2004 16:17:58 -0000 Hanspeter Roth wrote: > I have set an idle timeout for the hard-disk. But when there is no > user activity there are frequent disk accesses. Yes, this is Unix. Even when there is no user activity, a Unix system normally is still running a number of daemons such as syslogd which regularly write to the filesystem. Beyond that, the syncer mechanism tries to reduce the number of dirty memory buffers every thirty seconds or so. > How can one trace disk access? > I'd like to know the kind of access and on which files/directories/ > nodes. I'd like to log on the console or on a memory disk file. If you ask this question in the hopes of shutting down disk access long enough to permit your drives to spin down, then please be aware that such an answer won't help. Instead you probably will need to mount filesystems read-only and create RAM disks in a fashion similar to booting off limited-write media like Compact Flash. Either that, or simply shutdown the system or run zzz to suspend the system via APM/APCI. -- -Chuck