Abnormal disk access

[stan]

On Fri, 31 Jul 2009 19:12:48 +0100 (BST)
Patrick Dupre <pd520 at york.ac.uk> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> Since I installed fedora 11 x86_64, I do periodically (every 15-20 mn)
> disque access even when the machine is at rest. It does not appear
> that the machine should swap (the memory is not full at all).
> The major incovenient is that it also froze the machine without
> clear increase of the CPU (again the machine is at rest).
> I do not see what could cause this. I never appear on the
> same machine before in i686 (I just set a brand new disk).
> 
> What could cause this problem ?
> 

On my system the two processes that cause similar symptoms are updatedb
and prelink.  Both are accessing the hard drive as part of their
regular processing.  It could also be other jobs run by cron running in
the background.

top will show running jobs, and iotop will show disk access.