Hard drive running continuously after boot-up

[chrismt]

Hello,

I am running Linux Mint 17.1 XFCE on my Dell Inspiron B120 Celeron (1.4 Ghz, 1GB). I have had an annoying issue for the past couple of months, which began even when I was running Version 17. (I upgraded to 17.1 thinking it may solve the issue, but it did not.)

After booting into Linux Mint, everything is fine for about 5 minutes time, and then something will access my hard drive non-stop for about an hour, which seriously degrades my computer's performance. After about an hour, the process will end and my computer will be "back to normal'.

I ran "iotop" and found that when my computer's hard drive was continuously running, it was because of this program: find / -i@-o -print0
which was consuming about 98% of the IO. After the hard drive "settles down", the program is no longer listed in iotop.

I also recall that I installed a couple of programs around the same time that the problem began: OpenShot, BleachBit, and GNU emacs. (I uninstalled BleachBit thinking this may be the offending program, but this did not solve the problem.)

Wondering if anyone has any clues on why this program is running, and how I can remove it?

Thanks for any help you can provide!

Chris

[WharfRat]

chrismt,

If this happens soon after booting then it sounds like it could be a cron job kicking off. What's listed in /etc/cron.daily

Code: Select all

ls /etc/cron.daily

Also when it starts again run and paste back the output of

Code: Select all

pgrep -a find

[chrismt]

Hi WharfRat,

here are the results of ls /etc/cron.daily:

0anacron aptitude cracklib-runtime locate man-db passwd upstart
apt bsdmainutils dpkg logrotate mlocate samba

and here are the results of pgrep -a find:

2630 /bin/sh /usr/bin/updatedb.findutils
2638 /bin/sh /usr/bin/updatedb.findutils
2695 /usr/bin/find / -ignore_readdir_race ( -fstype NFS -o -fstype nfs -o -fstype nfs4 -o -fstype afs -o -fstype binfmt_misc -o -fstype proc -o -fstype smbfs -o -fstype autofs -o -fstype iso9660 -o -fstype ncpfs -o -fstype coda -o -fstype devpts -o -fstype ftpfs -o -fstype devfs -o -fstype mfs -o -fstype shfs -o -fstype sysfs -o -fstype cifs -o -fstype lustre_lite -o -fstype tmpfs -o -fstype usbfs -o -fstype udf -o -fstype ocfs2 -o -type d -regex \(^/tmp$\)\|\(^/usr/tmp$\)\|\(^/var/tmp$\)\|\(^/afs$\)\|\(^/amd$\)\|\(^/alex$\)\|\(^/var/spool$\)\|\(^/sfs$\)\|\(^/media$\)\|\(^/var/lib/schroot/mount$\) ) -prune -o -print0

[WharfRat]

chrismt,

Your have two disk indexing packages installed, locate and mlocate. At some time you installed locate which was replaced by mlocate.

Locate is inefficient due to the fact that it rereads all the contents of all directories each time it updates the database. mlocate maintains timestamp information so it skips files that haven't changed making it much less demanding on resources.

Purge the locate package and reinstall mlocate to make sure the /etc/alternatives/locate symlink is set to /usr/bin/mlocate.

Good luck

[chrismt]

Works like a charm -- problem solved!!!

Thanks so much WharfRat, this had been driving me crazy! All the best to you.

[dimbulb1024]

OK, we will start with, I'm listening to the Dead and wharfrat has chrismt's query help.

Seems I may be in the right place.

Having searched and not finding a better answer, and not wanting to starting a new post, as my issue is close, I will start with, how do I purge locate?

I will try that and then venture on.

ls /etc/cron.daily
0anacron aptitude cracklib-runtime locate man-db ntp samba
apt bsdmainutils dpkg logrotate mlocate passwd upstart

[WharfRat]

In the terminal

Code: Select all

sudo apt purge locate