Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 99033
Excessive disk activity freezes system
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:55:38 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020529 Description of problem: After I installed RH 9.0 (I've been with RH since 5.0), suddenly, at random, my hard disk (intel t20 laptop, 10GB HD, 128MB RAM), begins an inetnsive disk activity. During this time, mouse and keyboard<are non-responsive, and my HD led stays 100% on. After some 10 minutes, this passes, and I can use the machine again. Any ideas ? Thanks, Philip Schalkx Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Couldn't Reproduce Steps to Reproduce: 1.Leave machine on, do anything 2. 3. Additional info:
This does not sound like an installation issue - reassigning.
It's probably running slocate, or something similar. This shouldn't completely freeze the system, though; that is probably an I/O scheduling issue.
To be very precise the machine does freeze "completely" when the problem occurs. If I move the mouse during the problem, the cursor moves some 20-30 seconds later, in a very sluggish motion. I can ctrl-alt-F1 and login as root (takes a few minutes), but top or ps don't report any process using a lot of CPU. A similar problem also occurs when I open some of my windows98 directories: opening some of them cause the same problem. Can I do something else to help ?
Thanks for the bug report. However, Red Hat no longer maintains this version of the product. Please upgrade to the latest version and open a new bug if the problem persists. The Fedora Legacy project (http://fedoralegacy.org/) maintains some older releases, and if you believe this bug is interesting to them, please report the problem in the bug tracker at: http://bugzilla.fedora.us/