Constant disk activity; who is doing that?

Hello there,
I pimped my G5 with two new internal drives (WD 1TB Caviar Black) and copied onto them clones of other disks and volumes (with SuperDuper), including my old system. Seems to be quite succesful operation; nearly all works as usual again.
Of course I expected mdimport to do some heavy indexing, with constant disk activity as a result.
But, after a couple of days, there is still constant disk activity: every second or so some 5,99MB is being written to disk, according to Activity Monitor.
I do not understand which app is doing this, for no one seems to be very busy at all.
Any ideas out there?
Appreciated,
Marius

I just dealt with this problem effectively on my Mac Pro (Snow Leopard 10.6.4), after considerable mucking around. Hard drive noise, flashing lights, system slow-downs, all driving me nuts (admittedly, a short drive).
Turned out to be Spotlight. As it happens I have a WD Studio 1-terabyte Firewire drive that's always hooked up. I back up to it several times a day when I'm on a project, and it has clones of my application drive and three data drives, all visible on my desktop. I also have a separate Windows drive that's visible. Recently, for reasons known only to Apple, I'm sure, Spotlight began indexing and re-indexing the cloned logical drives on the WD Studio. Never stopped -- as soon as it finished, it would start again. I simply went into the Privacy tab of the Spotlight preference pane from System Preferences, made sure that all my drives appeared in the box, and then removed all four cloned drives and the Windows drive so that Spotlight would no longer index them.
Problem solved. If you have extra physical or logical drives beyond those actually in your system (as opposed to Firewire or USB drives), try removing them and re-adding them in the Privacy tab of the Spotlight preference pane. Then wait for Spotlight to re-index the drives -- could take a bit of time, and the drives will keep accessing until re-indexing is complete. If that works, you're good. If it doesn't and the process just keeps going, you might have to remove permanently the external drives and clones from the list of drives to be indexed. That's what I ended up having to do.
Hope this helps.

Similar Messages

Constant disk activity on 2 node RAC 11g cluster - Can anyone help?

Hi Folks,
My first post on the forum so I hope you go easy with me.
I'm new to Oracle, and thought that the best way to get into it would be to dive in and build an experimental RAC cluster on my home network. To this end I used Jeff Hunter's "Build Your Own Oracle RAC Cluster on Oracle Enterprise Linux and iSCSI" guide.
My only departures from the guide is that I've modelled the architecture entirely within Vmware ESXi on a single quad core Opteron server (HP ML115 G5) with 8Gb RAM and a 1 Tb SATA hard disk. I've also used Openfiler 2.3 for the iSCSI storage rather than the deprecated 2.2. I therefore have 2 Virtual Machines running Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.1, and a 3rd VM running Openfiler 2.3. Each VM has a second virtual NIC connected to an isolated vswitch which functions as the RAC interconnect network.
I've completed the configuration of the cluster and all the checks (as per the article) report that everything is a-OK.
However I've noticed that there is a high rate of disk activity on my server, which continues constantly. I've left the server running overnight and the continuous disk activity is still there! :(
I also noticed yesterday that I could not stop the first instance using either the instance specifc srvctl stop instance -d orcl -i orcl1
or the global srvctl stop database -d orcl. In both cases the command appeared to hang. I had no problems stopping the second instance on the other node though. Not sure whether this is related.
So - does anyone else run a similar "single box" setup, and if you do are you noticing similar constant disk activity? If not could you recommend any troublehooting steps I can take to determine the root cause? While the disk activity is contant, the "bursts" appear random, so it looks like something is going on. Not sure what though! :)
Any replies would be much appreciated.
Peter

Thanks for taking the time to reply.
You are right in that there are a lot of guides around to creating "fake" RAC clusters, however Hunter's guide appears to be one of the best and I found it while browsing around the Oracle website. Of course Oracle stress that it is entirely unsupported and for "education purposes" :)
Well education is what I'm after and I accept that it would perform nowhere near a real cluster. Still the performance issues I'm having appear abnormal.
The background to this is that one the applications I manage at work (Vmware) has a backend DB hosted on RAC. There is an entire database team who look after this area. For my own personal edification I'd like to learn a bit more about RAC (and Oracle in general) and get my hands dirty, though I currently have no long term aspirations to become a full fledged DBA. I'm working through a text on Safari and I thought it would be useful to create a "fake" as you put it cluster at home and play around a bit. Unfortunately the resources to create a "proper" environment are currently not within my means:(
With regards to my problem I was hoping someone here has played around with a similar setup and could advise whether they had similar issues. The 3 days or so I spent labouring through the 60 page guide was far more educational than just reading a text.
I've found that the excessive disk activity appears to be down to my server and Vmware ESXi rather than Oracle. I stopped all instances and CRS and the constant disk activity still continued. I had taken number of snapshots of each linux node during my installation and I'm currently deleting these to see whether this improves things. My hard disk could well be the bottleneck as ESXi is really meant for SCSI controllers and disks if using local datastores.
I'll take your advice and have a trawl through Ebay. I will also install standalone oracle on a seperate box and have a play with that.
Peter

Why is there now unusually high, constant disk activity on my Mac?

Firefox 9.0.1 on Mac OS X 10.6.8 is churning my HD and then must be force quit. It seems to run but there's definately something new and unusual happening here.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.
You are right in that there are a lot of guides around to creating "fake" RAC clusters, however Hunter's guide appears to be one of the best and I found it while browsing around the Oracle website. Of course Oracle stress that it is entirely unsupported and for "education purposes" :)
Well education is what I'm after and I accept that it would perform nowhere near a real cluster. Still the performance issues I'm having appear abnormal.
The background to this is that one the applications I manage at work (Vmware) has a backend DB hosted on RAC. There is an entire database team who look after this area. For my own personal edification I'd like to learn a bit more about RAC (and Oracle in general) and get my hands dirty, though I currently have no long term aspirations to become a full fledged DBA. I'm working through a text on Safari and I thought it would be useful to create a "fake" as you put it cluster at home and play around a bit. Unfortunately the resources to create a "proper" environment are currently not within my means:(
With regards to my problem I was hoping someone here has played around with a similar setup and could advise whether they had similar issues. The 3 days or so I spent labouring through the 60 page guide was far more educational than just reading a text.
I've found that the excessive disk activity appears to be down to my server and Vmware ESXi rather than Oracle. I stopped all instances and CRS and the constant disk activity still continued. I had taken number of snapshots of each linux node during my installation and I'm currently deleting these to see whether this improves things. My hard disk could well be the bottleneck as ESXi is really meant for SCSI controllers and disks if using local datastores.
I'll take your advice and have a trawl through Ebay. I will also install standalone oracle on a seperate box and have a play with that.
Peter

T520 Constant disk activity

T520, 4 GB RAM, 500 GB hard drive, Win 7 Pro 64 bit,
Do any fellow T520 users see constant, about one flash per second, hard disk activity. I've turned off the usual suspects, including Windows Indexing Service and all the Intel security and management services and uninstalled Symantec Endpoint Protection 12, which has also been mentioned in certain articles about disk thrashing.
The side effects of this constant disk activity is that the computer will not enter sleep or hibernate due to inactivity, although I can force it manually.I'm also worried about premature disk wear.
Any hints would be gretly appreciated.
T520 4239-CTO
T61/p 6459-CTO (Gone but not forgotten)
A31/p XP Pro 1 gig memory
A30/p XP Pro 1 gig memory
TP600 Win 2K 288 mb memory
701C Win 98 Don't ask

HI mixz1,
I can't answer your question directly, but on my T400 running Win7 Pro 64 I also see the HDD LED flash ~ once per second. My guess it's monitoring drive status, not actually doing reads or writes. Even so, the machine sleeps as expected.
Z.
The large print: please read the Community Participation Rules before posting. Include as much information as possible: model, machine type, operating system, and a descriptive subject line. Do not include personal information: serial number, telephone number, email address, etc. The fine print: I do not work for, nor do I speak for Lenovo. Unsolicited private messages will be ignored. ... GeezBlog
English Community Deutsche Community Comunidad en Español Русскоязычное Сообщество

ServiceLayer.exe and constant disk activity

Hi
I wondered what process was causing HD activity every 5 seconds on my system.
File Monitor from Sysinternals reported that the servicelayer.exe performs a series of disk operations every 5 seconds, continuously. It tries to create a directory, fails because directory exists, opens PCCSConfig.dat, does an query on the file, performs three read operations, one query, one read etc ... until after 9 information queries and 32 reads the file is closed - and after 5 seconds the whole process is repeated. A File Monitor log file is attached showing the constant disk access.
Is all that constant disk activity really necessary or is it a bug?
PC Suite: Version 6.83.14.1
Connectivity Cable Drivers: Version 6.83.9.0
PC Connectivity Solution: Version 7.7.10.0
Cheers,
-jh
hemmo
Attachments:
ServiceLayerLog.LOG ‏44 KB

Hi,
I think that it is "functionality", anyway open Nokia Connection Manager and turn off "Serial Port cable"....
(at least that stop my PC with PC Suite 6.84....)
Anyway, you can inform Nokia about this issue if you want

HT201209 It say it's not activated properly what does that mean

My iTunes gift card is not activated properly what does that mean?

iTunes Gift Cards do not contain any balance until they are activated at the point of purchase. This means your Gift Card cannot be redeemed. Go back to where you purchased the gift card and ask the retailer to activate it for you.

HT1937 my ipod is saying activation required what does that mean/

please help me my ipod is saying activation required what does that mean/

Try plugging your iPod into your computer then launch iTunes.

FF 18.0.1 constant disk activity after 1 minute with no tabs open

FF 18.0.1 on Windows XP SP3.
Within 1 minute of starting FF I observe constant and excessive disk activity.
I am unable to use any other applications due to the response time.
I have closed all tabs and disabled all plugins.
I have just started a FF "reset to factory default", but pop-up window for "Please wait while Firefox cleans up your old data" has been running for 15 minutes.
Any ideas?

It sounds like you've got some other problems on your computer as well.
Restart your PC, then try the steps at http://www.microsoft.com/atwork/maintenance/speed.aspx#fbid=6pXkdz7T_94 to try to clean your computer up.
After that, Try to reset Firefox again.

Constant Disk Activity with Mac mini

Hi,
I have a current model mac mini 2.5Ghz (with a few upgrades) that is having a weird issue.
I seem to be getting what appears to be almost constant hard disk activity/noise?
As i'm typing this i can hear a constant thrumming fom what appears to be the hard disk.
The spec is:
2.5Ghz i5
8gb of ram
Apple shipped 750gb 7200rpm HD
Apple shipped 500gb 5400rpm HD
The activity is pretty much constant afer waking from sleep or booting and last for ages.
I have external hard drives connected but as yet have not set up or turned on time machine so i cvan't believe it's that?
Any help please?
Thanks.

Hi, Took some screen graps, all this info means nothing to me though! lol

IPOD touch 2nd generation is disabled. Restored on itunes. It had a message something about Apple Mobile Device Service is not activated. What does that mean?? How can I fix it???

Apple Mobile Device Service not activated ------ What does that mean?? How can I fix it or activate it???? Already completed a restore in itunes.

Try here:
iPhone, iPad, iPod touch: How to restart the Apple Mobile Device Service (AMDS) on Windows

Disk is full - what does that mean

Where can I delete items that are not used because I keep getting "disk is full"

First, empty the Trash if you haven't already done so. Then reboot. That will temporarily free up some space.
According to Apple documentation, you need at least 9 GB of available space on the startup volume (as shown in the Finder Info window) for normal operation. You also need enough space left over to allow for growth of your data. There is little or no performance advantage to having more available space than the minimum Apple recommends. Available storage space that you'll never use is wasted space.
To locate large files, you can use Spotlight as described here. That method may not find large folders that contain a lot of small files.
You can also use a tool such as OmniDiskSweeper (ODS) to explore your volume and find out what's taking up the space. You can delete files with it, but don't do that unless you're sure that you know what you're deleting and that all data is safely backed up. That means you have multiple backups, not just one.
Proceed further only if the problem hasn't been solved.
ODS can't see the whole filesystem when you run it just by double-clicking; it only sees files that you have permission to read. To see everything, you have to run it as root.
Back up all data now.
Install ODS in the Applications folder as usual.
Triple-click the line of text below to select it, then copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C):sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper
Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.
Paste into the Terminal window (command-V). You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning not to screw up. If you see a message that your username "is not in the sudoers file," then you're not logged in as an administrator.
I don't recommend that you make a habit of doing this. Don't delete anything while running ODS as root. If something needs to be deleted, make sure you know what it is and how it got there, and then delete it by other, safer, means.
When you're done with ODS, quit it and also quit Terminal.

When I set up Contacts on iCloud, Contacts on my Mac consumes about 100% of a CPU, per Activity Monitor. Does that make sense?

I don't think this should be happening, but I haven't been able to find any reference to such a situation in Apple Support or on Forums.

I'm trying to do this. I unchecked Contacts, restarted my Mac and lo and behold, Contacts was rechecked! I unchecked it and checked Activity Monitor. By the time I returned to System Preferences, Contacts was rechecked. This happened 3 times. Now it has remained rechecked, AddressBookSourceSync is consuming over 90% of a CPU (mostly over 95%). I'm letting it go for about half an hour. I'm debating whether to let it go and see if it settles down (no evidence that it will). CPU time is over 30 minutes now. I think I'm going to quit (or Force Quit) AddressBookSourceSync, follow the suggested steps and see what happens.

Constant disk activity

I can constantly hear the HD on my iMac, there is about 1.3 gb Data read and 500mb data written over a period of 30 45 mins?
Im not installing anything, actually just using safari and mail... i've tried repairing permissions but it still continues.

The first step would be to figure out what is causing the drive activity.
Go to Applications / Utilities / Activity Monitor, and run it. You will see a list that will guide you to what is going on, specifically what processes are going on in the background.
What you do after you get this information depends on what you find in Activity Monitor. Post back if you need more help.

I can't stop "Reads in/sec" disk activity, remains at constant 20-30

I was hoping this community would be able to help me to solve this problem of constant disk activity I can't figure out. I'm afraid it'll kill my disk eventually.
Problem:
Constant disk access noise, "Reads in/sec" remains at constant 20-30 even when I have next to nothing running. It's clearly attempting to do something. Kernel task is one of the few tasks showing activity, but only a few CPU %.
This occurs only on one user account. If I switch the account to a clean one, disk activity stops.
In Disk Utility I've tried repairing permissions. Also, Verify reveals nothing abnormal.
Setup:
- MacBook Pro 2GHz / 2GB RAM / >50GB Free disk space
- FileVault
- Mac OSX 10.4.9
Advanced
Typing sudo fs_usage in Terminal reveals following constant activity pattern between "pread", "select" and "RdData"
02:22:54 pread 0.000048
02:22:54 pread 0.000046
02:22:54 pread 0.000137 W
02:22:55 select 0.010047 W
02:22:55 RdData[async] 0.015651 W kernel_task
02:22:55 PgOut[async] 0.010949 W kernel_task
02:22:55 RdData[async] 0.019457 W
02:22:55 pread 0.015706 W
02:22:55 pread 0.000047
02:22:55 RdData[async] 0.001062 W kernel_task
02:22:55 select 0.010016 W
02:22:55 pread 0.200621 W kernel_task
02:22:55 RdData[async] 0.023622 W
02:22:55 pread 0.002733 W
02:22:55 pread 0.000045
02:22:55 RdData[async] 0.001107 W kernel_task
02:22:55 RdData[async] 0.027815 W
02:22:55 pread 0.002978 W
02:22:55 RdData[async] 0.000150 W kernel_task
02:22:55 pread 0.000049
02:22:55 RdData[async] 0.001090 W kernel_task
02:22:55 RdData[async] 0.032117 W
02:22:55 pread 0.000068
02:22:55 pread 0.000043
02:22:55 RdData[async] 0.001110 W kernel_task
02:22:55 select 0.013820 W
02:22:55 RdData[async] 0.035898 W
I'm running out of things to try. Any ideas on how might I fix this? Should I migrate my (massive FileVaulted) directory to a clean account or what?
MacBook Pro 15" Mac OS X (10.4.8) 2GHz / 2GB / ATI X1600 256MB

Seems you're running some sync program in that user account. Since it doesn't happen in another account, it's not system-wide. If you have one running, quit it and see if that fixes things. If not, then disable FileVault and see that fixes things.

Someone is selling an ipad and it says it is locked in activation, what does that mean

Someone is selling an ipad mini 2 and it says in the description that the ipad is locked in activation. What does that mean?

Don't buy it. It's likely a stolen iPad.
They should have done this.
What to do before selling or giving away your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5661
If the iPad was running iOS 7, iCloud: Find My iPhone Activation Lock in iOS 7
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5818
iCloud: Activation Lock
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH13695
Find My iPhone Activation Lock: Removing a device from a previous owner’s account
http://support.apple.com/kb/ts4515
Buying or Selling a Used iPhone or iPad Running iOS 7? Read This First!
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/buying-or-selling-a-used-iphone-running-ios-7-read- this-first/
 Cheers, Tom

Constant disk activity; who is doing that?

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for