Hard disk thrashing

[mintmintmint]

This has been happening for about 10 days now, I think. After I have booted into Mint for some time (regardless of whether it was to restore a hibernation or to boot from scratch), the hard disk continually gets accessed for a long time (for over a minute I think?). When I press Ctrl+Esc, I do not see any programs using CPU% other than the ones I'm normally running -- Firefox, Kate, Dolphin and maybe LibreOffice. Those programs show a small percentage -- like 1% or so. I keep an eye to see if any new processes come in or if I see any process go out, but I see no such change in the list. I think that if the hard disk is going to be accessed that continually ("hard disk thrashing"), that I should be seeing a process with a high % but it's bothersome that I don't see such thing. Furthermore, I can't think of why would any process need to access the hard disk so much. Any suggestions? Thank you.

[Neil Edmond]

How much RAM does the system have? And what is your swappiness setting?
There could be a bunch of swapping going on...

[Lingula]

Install and run iotop to see what is accessing the drive. CPU usage and disk usage are usually not maxed out at the same time by the same process, so top can be misleading.

[mintmintmint]

How much RAM does the system have? And what is your swappiness setting?
There could be a bunch of swapping going on...

The system does not access the hard disk constantly (other than what I described), not even when playing videos.

Install and run iotop to see what is accessing the drive. CPU usage and disk usage are usually not maxed out at the same time by the same process, so top can be misleading.

Thanks for telling me about iotop. I like that utility. I wonder why some names are in brackets and others not. Also some names end in /0 and I think I saw a 0:0 or something like that.

After running it for a while, the event happened twice. The first time I could not see what it was for two reasons. First, the text went away fast, and, second, my display has a lot of damage and I can not see the top lines very well -- I forgot to drag the window down.

The second time it was "updatedb.mlocate" running constantly and [jbd2/sda1-8] running on and off. The first time was not "updatedb.mlocate" nor [jbd2/sda1-8] because the text was longer.

I will keep watching with iotop. Meanwhile, what could these two processes be doing to access the hard disk for so long?

[Lingula]

My understanding is that ubdatedb.mlocate indexes files in all mounted filesystems so that you can quickly and easily search for files. Don't know how it's integrated into Mint or KDE specifically, but I believe it's a daily cron job in Ubuntu. It's probably the source of your problem. If it doesn't appreciably slow down your system then it should be fine to leave it alone. If it is creating problems then you may need to explore solutions such as changing the timing of the cron job. There are probably other fixes in the Mint or Ubuntu forums, but you may want to explore the options with someone who understands the indexing features better than I do.

jbd2 is normal journaling activity. It uses very few resources. You can modify the commit frequency in fstab if you wish, but I don't think it's the source of your problem.

[mintmintmint]

Thank you for the information.