The HDD activity LED keeps glowing & the system becomes very slow

[linuxyogi]

The HDD activity LED keeps glowing & the system becomes very slow.
How do I troubleshoot this ? Please tell me what commands I need to run which will tell us the needed info.

[CelticWarrior]

It can be due to excessive use of swap.
Check your running processes.

[linuxyogi]

It can be due to excessive use of swap.
Check your running processes.

$ free -m
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           3810        1983         164         251        1662        1337
Swap:          1158           1        1157

It just happened again. Only streaming Youtube on Firefox. It continued for like 5-7 mins & the hdd activity returned to normal. After that the system was responsive again.

[linuxyogi]

Do you think my PC is running out of Ram ?

$ sudo inxi -m
Memory:    Used/Total: 2063.4/3810.5MB
           Array-1 capacity: 64 GB devices: 4 EC: None
           Device-1: DIMM_A1 size: 4 GB speed: 2133 MT/s type: DDR4
           Device-2: DIMM_A2 size: No Module Installed type: N/A
           Device-3: DIMM_B1 size: No Module Installed type: N/A
           Device-4: DIMM_B2 size: No Module Installed type: N/A

[CelticWarrior]

Check with 'top'

[linuxyogi]

Check with 'top'

top.png
(click to enlarge)

[Autodave]

RAM usage looks fine. Try disabling all of your ad blockers and then enable uBlock and see what happens.

[CatKiller]

It just happened again. Only streaming Youtube on Firefox. It continued for like 5-7 mins & the hdd activity returned to normal. After that the system was responsive again.

Do you have some kind of file indexer running when it happens?

[pushbike06]

I recently experienced HD hyperactivity and I suggest three possible causes.
I have 4 GB ram.
1. Unattended system/ apps update / upgrade will slow down user activity and cause HD activity.
2. Some apps, Firefox, have unattended update settings, this could slow down user activity.
3. I use "sleep /hibernate" shut down and found that this caused hyper HD activity. Solved by shutting down completely and restart. Probably caused by excessive swap activity and limited ram space.

[dinkidonk]

The EXT4 filesystem may also be doing "optimizations" if the file system is starting to fragment. This may cause lots of drive activity because blocks are being moved around, but I have never experienced any significant slow downs when this happens and it is usually only happening when the drive is idle.