Re: [SLUG] disk throughput vs cron

From: Eben King (eben01@verizon.net)
Date: Thu Nov 02 2006 - 12:54:21 EST


On Thu, 2 Nov 2006, Rich Morgan wrote:

>> I run a disk-to-disk copy every morning at 5am, invoked by cron. Every
>> now and then, I see a drop in throughput (today it was from ~45 MB/s to
>> ~34 MB/s, from 5:01:30 to 5:08:30). How can I find out what's running at
>> this time and slowing down the copy? I already found the stuff in
>> /etc/crontab, and I moved that from 6:xx to 7:xx. I checked crontabs for
>> root and eben (news has none), nothing about that time.
>
> Deja vu. Wasn't this topic discussed earlier?

Sorta. I had varying overall throughput, but didn't keep a log so I didn't
know at what time during the copy it happened.

> Anyway, you could set a cron job to do a ps aux > pre_dd_process_list.txt
> before you do your dd to capture a snapshot of what's running and the CPU
> utilization... just a thought.

That's my proposed "brute force" method. Since I'm kicking dd every 30s to
get the throughput, I can run ps at the same time. Any way of associating
a given running process with (number of) outstanding I/O events?
Maybe something in /proc?

-- 
-eben     QebWenE01R@vTerYizUonI.nOetP     royalty.no-ip.org:81
Your pretended fear lest error might step in is like the man who
would keep all wine out of the country lest men should be drunk.
                                               -- Oliver Cromwell
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