Realplayer and others causing disk activity

tyreth

I have a problem that's been irritating me long enough. Whenever I use realplayer after a short/long while, (say 5 minutes) I see my hard disk activity slowly increase. The system slows down and the player starts to get jerky. If I try to flick to a console the hd activity goes up to max I think and doesn't go anywhere. If I try to quit realplayer, then most of the time the activity goes up and it just sits there with the led on.
It's not just realplayer though, some other apps also make the hd activity go up, but usually not this extreme. A couple of times opening an image in gnome, or quitting evolution while using kde as my DE (doesn't seem to happen as much in gnome).

Any ideas what may be causing it, or how I could monitor it to see?

bokkepoot · Posted: Sun Jun 15, 2003 5:43 am Post subject:

[quote] Whenever I use realplayer after a short/long while, (say 5 minutes) I see my hard disk activity slowly increase. The system slows down and the player starts to get jerky
[/quote]

Which is most likely stuff being swapped out to disk

[quote]
If I try to flick to a console the hd activity goes up to max I think and doesn't go anywhere. If I try to quit realplayer, then most of the time the activity goes up and it just sits there with the led on.
[/quote]

And this is the stuff being swapped in again from disk. It looks like valid normal behaviour to me. (And you can check if my hunch is right by fi. running vmstat where you should pay attention to the swpd size rising and falling)

tyreth · Posted: Sun Jun 15, 2003 6:01 am Post subject:

You are indeed correct. So what could be causing it, since it didn't always happen? A few weeks/months ago I never used to have this problem.

Perhaps an upgrade to 4.3.0 from 4.2.99 would help?

I watched top for memory use of apps, and none of them are going up, nowhere near as much as the swap is being used up.

I waited long enough and sure enough it came back up after a while.

So what do you think might be the cause?

tyreth · Posted: Sun Jun 15, 2003 8:54 am Post subject:

I just updated to 4.3.0 and the problem still exists

Any ideas?

kram · n00b Joined: 29 Nov 2002 Posts: 35

Yeah, I had this problem as well. I was using a fancy animated mouse cursor. It went away when I changed back to the default cursor.

Are you using a non default cursor?

tyreth · Posted: Sun Jun 15, 2003 9:49 am Post subject:

Unbelievable, that was the problem!

Why? That's ridiculous, and annoying.

Thanks for the answer.