Determine what's raping my harddrive?

pherplexed · Apr 15, 2008

Wasn't sure if I should post this in the OS X forum or the hardware specific problem. Anyway, every now and then my MacPro will get supper sluggish and i can hear the harddrive churning away. Inside Activity Monitor, I can see the disk usage graph spike big time, but it doesn't tell me what applications (or services) are ass-raping my harddrive when this happens. Most of the apps listed show nominal CPU usage.

What can I use to see what's paging my harddrive when this happens?

thnks!

operator207 · Apr 15, 2008

man lsof in the terminal.

Specifically 'sudo lsof -s | more' may show you what program is holding a file open and just writing to it. It won't be easy to find, but its a start.

Note: to page down in more, use the spacebar, to page up use the 'b' key.
To quit, use 'q'.

Eidorian · Apr 15, 2008

If you have Leopard you can use DTrace.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/390140/

There's a nifty little command like application called bitesize.d here. I used it to narrow down VirusScan thrashing on my office machines.

operator207 · Apr 15, 2008

Eidorian said:
If you have Leopard you can use DTrace.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/390140/

There's a nifty little command like application called bitesize.d here. I used it to narrow down VirusScan thrashing on my office machines.

Yes, use the above, MUCH easier to understand. Forget what I said above. I mean you *can* use what I said above, but this will give you a much easier to read analysis.

Search

Search

Determine what's raping my harddrive?

pherplexed

macrumors member

operator207

macrumors 6502

Eidorian

macrumors Penryn

operator207

macrumors 6502

Our Staff