[Omega_Shadow]

I just installed PCLinuxOS and noticed the insane amount of system resources going into ghost hard drive reads. The computer could be completely idle, nothing but a chat program in the background. But the hard drives are acting like they are transferring gigs of information back and forth to the point of dragging the entire computer to a standstill. I have to shut down and restart to get control again. I am completely stumped. Any thoughts?

[-=ZeroHour=-]

I haven't used PCLinux but if you can get to a term window, type "ps -eaf" and it will show you all the processes that are running.
Repeat it a few times and check which procs are taking up cpu time. Take the pid of the one you want to trace and type "ps -eaf | grep pid" (replace the pid with the actual number). This will show you the related processes that have the same pid.
You can repeat this with the other pids and it will eventually show you the name of the process that kicked it off.

if you want further help, post the results of the "ps -eaf".

[rob.rice]

I had this problem I ran top and found 3 copys of ssh running then I ran netstat
someone had broken in to my computer and was useing my computer as a proxie to transfer files
so I rebooted and commented out the line that starts sshd , killed sshd , ran ckroot

changed the root pass word to something 20 charters long and almost in leet

so my point in all this is your computer may have been broken in to

[Omega_Shadow]

well, not a hacker. No network activity while this is happening. However I only know this because I happened to have Gkrellm running on my desktop. I could not get into any programs, the computer was essentaly locked up doing whatever the hell it was doing

I am also experiencing a very noteable fall in speed. Looking at Ksysguard I know why: almost all 512mb of my ram is being used!!! I need to know how to print you out a list of running processes and their mem usage so you can tell me what processes need to stopped and how

[lynch]

Try this:

top -bn 1 > top.txt

This will run top for one iteration in batch mode and send a nice clear copy to a file named top.txt in your /home/username directory.
HTH
lynch

[Omega_Shadow]

Thanx Lynch. I will try that when I get home

semi-Unrelated topic: if you happen to know a site with a listing of common console commands I would like to read though it. I got this awesome hide-away console and I want to be able to do more in it. Just seems you could do so many things so much faster that way.

[lynch]

Here's the one from my signature: http://www.ss64.com/bash/

[Omega_Shadow]

Awesome *adds to bookmark folder*

Ok here is the output for top, kinda long. Let me know what processes can be killed and, if possible, how to keep them from starting up at boot.

[Omega_Shadow]

it happened again. Constant HD reads, system unresponsive. This time I couldnt even get my screensaver to come down. I am unable to start any programs when this is going on and a reset is the only way to gain control over my system

[lynch]

minilogd is using 22.8 % of your memory. That's a bit much. If you can, run top a few more times at intervals to see if minilogd is still hogging memory.
Also post the results of ps -eaf as suggested before:

ps -eaf > psresults.txt

Run the command hdparm /dev/hdx to see what the drive parameters are set to.
Also try booting up to a plain console W/O GUI. See if it still thrashes around.
lynch

[Omega_Shadow]

No problems w/o GUI, though when I go GUI I get massive amount of memory useage.

Whenever I sit down at my computer I run top. minilogd uses about 16% to 24% of memory when I check. This isnt normal is it?

My system is getting slower and slower. I want to get it moving as fast as it used to. Lynch, you said that minilogd is using up alot of memory. Can I shut that down or is it a vital processs? What is it while we are talking about it.

Also, could the memory useage be causeing the hard drive reads? A memory leak that causes the system to use the swap as memory? Is that even possible? The hard drive only starts it's massive reads into day three of uptime.....

Oh yes, and below is the results of ps that you ask for.

Thanx for you help.

[lynch]

It seems that minilogd collects kernel messages until syslogd takes over. In the ps -eaf you posted, I didnt see syslogd running at all. So apparently the logging chores are'nt being taken over by syslogd. Try this as root before things get busy:
killall minilogd
chkconfig syslog on
HTH
lynch

[Omega_Shadow]

done, Now only time will tell

[Omega_Shadow]

I am noticeing that my computer is still slower then sin. Idle I am using 500,000 kb of memory. Thats just not right.

[Omega_Shadow]

gradualy getting better, Memory is back into the safe range (over 170,000 kb free) and programs are starting to run faster, a tad choppy though