12.04 LTS Runs hard drive like crazy, anyone else?

[fixitdude]

12.04 LTS is running the hard drive like crazy whenever I start any program. It will do this for up to 2 full minutes!

I'm wondering if anyone else is having this problem, sure makes it sluggish.

Even if KDE is not running and I run something from terminal from another computer via X, it just starts running the HD and I can't figure out what's doing it or why.

I've tried "ps" and "top" of course and I see kswapd0 running but when I use something like gkrellm (a CPU and memory monitoring program) swap is hardly in use and memory is below half while this is happening.

Mysql is not running, I made sure of that.

One thing that helps is installing "iotop", which is like top but for I/O:
sudo apt-get install iotop

When this happens, watching with iotop, kswapd0 moves to the top and says 99% I/O usage, if I am reading it right, but yet no read or write usage to the left so I don't know what it's doing since a swap move would probably take a write I would think. Maybe memory management?

Some other programs move up there too, sometimes kdm_greet moves to the top at 99% also, but it's just sitting there doing nothing really, I had no KDE session running at the time, logged in only via terminal for this test so I don't understand that one except that things are getting backed up because of the delays this is causing to I/O.

It never had this problem until I upgraded to 12.04, which ended up being a fresh install, leaving my home folder untouched.

I found this but it's about a total lock up and this is just a pause or slow down due to I/O problem I am having.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/993187

I'm going to try the 3.3.6 kernel like the #91 bug report said and see if that solves this problem, I will post again here if it does of course.

I am running 3.2.0-23-generic-pae so I don't know what will happen.

Anyone seen any bug reports or fixes on this type of I/O issue?

[efflandt]

You have not given any clue what hardware you are running or amount of RAM (and whether any is shared for integrated video). It almost sounds like your system is swapping out RAM to make room for whatever you are loading.

What does free in a terminal say?

[fixitdude]

I installed the 3.3.6 kernel and the system seems to be OK now, the disk is quiet as can be, really it's just back to normal. Here's what I did:

Link: http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.3.6-precise/

Download this files in a folder:
linux-headers-3.3.6-030306-generic_3.3.6-030306.201205121335_amd64.deb
linux-headers-3.3.6-030306_3.3.6-030306.201205121335_all.deb
linux-image-3.3.6-030306-generic_3.3.6-030306.201205121335_amd64.deb

Start the Terminal, go to your download folder and type this:
sudo dpkg -i *.deb

Next time you reboot it should be running the new kernel, you can pick which kernel to run from the grub menu at startup if you want to go back.

"Hold down SHIFT to display the GRUB menu during boot. In certain cases, pressing the ESC key may also display the menu."

[fixitdude]

In the example above, you need to pick the kernel type for your system and install all three of the files for it as above, like if you want the i386 kernel you want the headers file, the headers "all" file and the image file.

Ubuntu should make this easier to do via synaptic or something.

It's possible that by the time you read this, they back ported the changes to the kernel you have so it may be possible to use synaptic at that point, so you might want to check that first.

[tumutanzi.com]

i have not experienced the problem, is it a problem of hardware?

[randywilharm]

I Thank You for the posted tips & hope your issues are solved.

We'll bookmark this page + put it in the Linux folder.

[fixitdude]

Thanks for the replies.

I don't think it was a actual hardware problem, as in bad hardware, because it never did this till I upgraded to 12.04 and now it's been a few more days and everything is great so it had to be something they fixed in the kernel.

Another cool program I ran into while trying to figure this out is "atop", it shows you a lot of things about memory use and also keeps a log. It's in the repositories.

It showed a lot of kernel "scanning" of memory, but swap wasn't increasing, which is a strange thing for it to do. It also showed the same as top did, the disk was 99% busy.

I could never identify a particular program because when the disk gets busy like that everything gets behind and it looks like other programs are getting stuck in line to do stuff.

This was one of those strange problems.

I hope the Ubuntu guys are backporting these fixes to make it easy for people to upgrade to a good kernel.