Re: What does this mean?

[Basil Chupin <blchupin@tpg.com.au>]

Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:

>On Fri, 12 Jul 2002 15:48:27 +1000, Basil Chupin said:
>
>  
>
>>Please let me give a brief resume of why I am trying to find out why my 
>>HD is being accessed every 5 seconds (actually it is also occurring on 
>>another computer at home and a friend's machine -- and all are running 
>>SuSE 8.0).
>>
>>  I first asked this Q isn another forum and received the general reply 
>>that it all had to do with the reiser fs -- which I didn't really 
>>believe. Why? because I didn't recall having this "problem" when I was 
>>running SuSE v7.2 with reiser fs. But just to be sure I started doing 
>>some testing.
>>
>>I have another HD which I use for testing purposes and on this one I 
>>installed SuSE v7.2 undere reiserfs. There was no 5 second accessing on 
>>the HD.
>>
>>I then installed SuSE 8 with ext3 (because someone said that the 5 
>>seconds-thingie only happened under reiser) - and I still got the 5 secs 
>>access. So, it wasn't confined to reiserfs.
>>    
>>
>
>Note that ext3 *also* has a 'kjournald' that ticks every 5 seconds.
>  
>
Ah, so it has similarities with reiser.

>I'm willing to bet that the system that wasn't seeing the ticking had all
>the filesystems mounted as ext2, which doesn't have a journal.
>  
>
Had you bet you would have lost! :-). All systems are operating under 
reiserfs.

You mentioning kjournald brought to min a conversation I had with a 
friend of mine who tends to have a similar approach to me when starting 
to run a new system (Linux [SuSE] in this case) and who also uses a 
second HD to test new installations before putting them onto the 'main' 
system.

We compared the outputs from the 'ps aux' command and what I found is 
that I am not running the kjournald process on any of my (3) 'systems' 
 while he is (on his 2 'systems') even though our setups are almost 
identical (with regards to running SuSE v8 ). I thought kjournald was 
part and parcel of reiserfs but then why isn't it running on my 
'systems'? Just another mystery.

Anyway, I think I have found the reason why I (and my friend and some 
other(s)) am having the HD accessed every 5 seconds, and after I have 
re-checked my finding I'll post the reason. It may not have anything 
directly to do with reiserfs but it may be  that another application may 
be causing reiserfs to misbehave (in this 5-second syndrome) or, of 
course, it has a bug in it causing the kernel to do the 'wrong thing' 
(the application does a patch to the kernel).

Cheers.