Mike Grusin wrote:
I've been wondering this myself ever since I got my FE+BE box running. The
hard drive light blinks approximately every second when it's "not doing
anything" (which doesn't happen much anymore ;) According to system
information in Myth, almost all of the RAM is being used (512M), but none of
the swap, so the drive access always puzzled me.
You're almost definitely running programs that are constantly writing
data to disk (i.e. syslogd/syslog-ng). By default, Linux will try to
dump that data to the disk (because volatile RAM is an unsafe place for
storage--reliability over quiet/hardware-life).
However, you can configure a "Laptop Mode" and set the amount of time
the kernel should wait before flushing these buffers. You'll also want
to modify the way filesystem access times are handled (i.e. turn off
access time updates, etc.).
http://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/stirling/computergeek/powersaving.html
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7539
And, if you want to understand what's happening, read the articles
linked from these two articles...
Mike
_______________________________________________
mythtv-users mailing list
mythtv-users@mythtv.org
http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
