[PLUG] Sudden massive disk activity eats 9 GB

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Tue Dec 7 08:23:08 UTC 2010


So I'm just sitting here writing in OOo on my Fedora 14 x86_64 laptop
and suddenly everything is running really slow. I have a CPU monitor in
my Gnome panel and it is jumping up to the max, but not permanently.

In the past I have had this happen sometimes when a Java something or
another in Firefox would consume all CPU activity for a long time.
Usually I just go into System Monitor, find the Java app, and kill it.
But this time I couldn't even get System Monitor to open. 

And then I noticed the hard disk light was running solid. Something was
doing a lot of writing to or reading from the disk, and it wasn't me. I
managed to close all running applications, but the disk activity
continued. I watched it nervously for about 20 minutes, and then finally
it stopped and things returned to normal. Just as it stopped ABRT
popped up a message that disappeared too fast to read in full, but it
said something about the error file was too big.

As it turns out by coincidence earlier today I had used Disk Usage
Analyzer to see how much of my 320 GB hard disk was used up. I remember
that it was 78%. After the frenetic disk activity I looked again, and
now it is 81% used up. Something has written about 9 GB to my hard
disk, probably some kind of error log.

I'd like to know what it is, i.e., what crashed and why. I'd also like
to delete it, since I doubt I need it. Of course, it might not be just
one file. I used ls to locate the most recent files with -t, but it's
not locating the file(s), nor is the -S parameter. I could use some
suggestions for how to sleuth out what happened.



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