Assistance finding out what process is writing to the disk drive

[Rajan, S. (Sanya)]

-----Original Message-----
From: fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com [mailto:fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Richard Shaw
Sent: 30 November 2009 10:56 PM
To: Community assistance, encouragement,and advice for using Fedora.
Subject: Re: Assistance finding out what process is writing to the disk drive

On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 2:44 PM, John Nissley <jnissley at nissley.org> wrote:
> I have a Fedora 11 server running 2.6.30.9-96.fc11.x86_64.  I recently
> noticed that my hard drive light is on constantly and was wondering how I
> can determine what is accessing the hard disk so much.  After boot the hard
> disk is acting normally for a few minutes to a few hours and then the hard
> drive light is lit up constantly.
>
> I have tried ps -ef to see if there was anything running that I do not know
> about and there is not.  Is there any way for me to determine which process
> is consistently using the hard disk?

I use iotop but there is probably a way to do it without installing
anything new...

Richard


You could parse the output of lsof. A script such as the one at http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-kernel-70/how-to-track-which-process-is-accessing-disk-505736/#post2523041 can do that for you.

Sanya


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