Disk thrashing ~1 hour after boot up

[jonnycat]

Hello all, I have been using F17 with KDE for the last few months, and every day, about an hour after I boot up the computer, I get about a minute of intense disk thrashing (I can hear the HDD going at it, and the light is solid).

If I reboot the computer later in the day this does not re-occur; it is just in the morning, once a day.

I don't know if this is a F17 issue, or a KDE issue, but I thought I would start here to see if anyone has any ideas.

Here is a screenshot of the activity, which also eats up a lot of CPU time; whatever is causing this does not appear in the processes listed in the System Monitor:

http://i.imgur.com/xf7xf.png

Thanks for any suggestions.

[george_toolan]

You don't know what disk thrashing is.

This is a feature and not a bug.

whatever is causing this does not appear in the processes listed in the System Monitor

Yes, it does. It's called updatedb and it updates the locate database. For further reference check

man updatedb

Also check /etc/cron.daily/ to find out which other programs are executed on a daily basis ;-)

[jonnycat]

Thanks George. Any idea as to why "updatedb" doesn't show any CPU activity in the the process listings, while the SystemLoad graphs obviously show a lot of activity?

[lighthouse]

I agree, my laptop sounds like a tractor and this is certainly bad for its health. And I have this problem not every hour but at any time it may occur. How is it possible to remove all that malware software that is going to crash my laptop?

[Firewing1]

Originally Posted by lighthouse

I agree, my laptop sounds like a tractor and this is certainly bad for its health. And I have this problem not every hour but at any time it may occur. How is it possible to remove all that malware software that is going to crash my laptop?

Using a hard drive isn't bad for it (unlike SSDs)... The noise just means its working hard. It won't crash your laptop.

Furthermore, it isn't malware or even bloatware - they are automated system tasks executed periodically to keep your system in top shape. I would strongly recommend against disabling system scheduled tasks such as prelink.