[ale] Occasional Extensive Disk I/O Question

[Armsby John-G16665]

I realize this is an akward question to answer but I will do my best to pose an intelligent question.

I have RedHat 8.0 running apache on ext3, 256 megs of RAM, standard desktop installation, addition of apache, MySQL, postfix.  The web server gets hit a few hundred times a day.

Problem:  Occasionally after a reboot command the machine hard drive light illuminates for 3-4 hours.  Eventually it goes off.  It is doing it as I write......


51 processes: 49 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states:  0.1% user,  0.1% system,  0.0% nice, 99.6% idle
Mem:   255452K av,  185172K used,   70280K free,       0K shrd,   21400K buff
Swap:  522104K av,       0K used,  522104K free                  141296K cached

  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
 1201 root      15   0  1020 1020   840 R     0.3  0.3   0:00 top
    1 root      15   0   476  476   424 S     0.0  0.1   0:06 init
    2 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 keventd
    3 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 kapmd
    4 root      34  19     0    0     0 SWN   0.0  0.0   0:00 ksoftirqd_CPU0
    5 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 kswapd
    6 root      25   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 bdflush
    7 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 kupdated
    8 root      25   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 mdrecoveryd
   12 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 kjournald
   68 root      16   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 khubd
  160 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 kjournald
  445 root      16   0  1044 1044   764 S     0.0  0.4   0:00 dhclient
  486 root      15   0   576  576   492 S     0.0  0.2   0:00 syslogd
  490 root      15   0   428  428   376 S     0.0  0.1   0:00 klogd
  507 rpc       15   0   532  532   460 S     0.0  0.2   0:00 portmap
  526 rpcuser   18   0   724  724   636 S     0.0  0.2   0:00 rpc.statd
  634 root      17   0  1464 1464  1220 S     0.0  0.5   0:00 sshd
  648 root      15   0   900  900   768 S     0.0  0.3   0:00 xinetd
  665 root      16   0  1196 1196  1036 S     0.0  0.4   0:00 safe_mysqld
  698 mysql     15   0  4652 4652  2032 S     0.0  1.8   0:00 mysqld
  766 root      15   0  1192 1192   952 S     0.0  0.4   0:00 master
  772 postfix   15   0  1252 1252  1004 S     0.0  0.4   0:00 nqmgr
[root at xena subsys]# 






How can I find out what is going on?  Where do I look to so what process is writing/reading to the disk?

Any help would be appreciated.


John



_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org
http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale