[xubuntu-users] Unexpected hard drive trashing

[Vincent Trouilliez]

Hi there,

I was using XUbuntu 12.04, now just upgraded to XUbuntu 12.10, first via
network update out of convenience, but noticed some problems and
regressions, so I re-installed it, this time using a physical CD-ROM and
erasing the System partition, but preserving my Home partition.
Unfortunately this did not improve a thing, so I am now posting here....

One problem per post so here is one: hard drive trashing.

1) during boot it's a long and uninterrupted hard drive symphony : is there
some file/app caching/pre-read going on.. that I could disable, by any
chance ?

2) once the desktop is loaded/ready, soon after I sometimes noticed a
single and long drive trashing coming out of nowhere, nothing related to my
activity on the computer at least. Has anyone noticed it ? I seem to
remember 12.04 did some background file indexing that I had to disable, but
forgot what it was exactly and how I disabled it... anyone could remind me ?

3) The weirdest case is this third one though : launch the "Sudoku" game
that comes pre-installed with XUbuntu. Now grab the window bar with the
mouse and move around the window : so long as the window is in motion, the
hard drive is going nuts !

4) I installed Gnome's system monitor (why not). In normal circumstances,
you would get only a limited hard drive activity when you start it for the
first time, and then it would run from RAM so would start instantly without
any drive activity. But here I am having a weird behaviour : I get
noticeable hard drive trashing wheneever I CLOSE it ! I can start it 20
times in a row and it would yield to zero drive activiy while starting,
which is expected, but sure enough the 20 times that I will close it, it
will cause a good bit a hard drive trashing.  I noticed something just as
weird in some recent release of (vanilla) Ubuntu, about Rhythmbox: whenever
I operated RB's built-in volume control slider, I would get massive hard
drive trashing so long as the cursor of the volume control was moving.
Drive would stop instantly as soon as I stopped moving the cursor, then
resume again as soon as move the cursor again.. completely weird.
Thankfully this problem went away with XUbuntu 12.04, and still absent from
12.10.  May it stay that way !


Any clues about the above ?


Regards,

--
Vincent Trouilliez
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/xubuntu-users/attachments/20121020/3cdba0d7/attachment.html>