Does Your Hard Disc Lights Stay On For Ages After Booting Linux?

Mine did, not any more though. Read on.

I was just a tad annoyed at the sudden increase in s-l-o-o-o-o-w responses after starting OpenSuse 11.4 up. I noticed that the hard drive indicator LED was continually lit for about 5-10 minutes after bootup. Performance was abysmal during this time.

Top showed almost no CPU being used, so I looks ad vmstat instead. This was the result, on an idle (and slow) system:

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vmstat -d 

disk  ... -----IO------ 
      ...    cur   sec 
sda8  ...      0   898

In the above, I’ve removed the individual reads and writes columns, to sort out the wheat from the chaff. I’m interested in I/Os overall. I’ve also removed the partitions that were showing 0 or 1 as the total I/O count.

The figures showed me that partition sda8 was getting hit to the tune of almost 900 I/O operations per second. Who or what is partition sda8?

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df -h | grep -i sda8 

/dev/sda8 251G 131G 108G 55% /data`

Now I know, so what’s open on this mount point?

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lsof /data 

COMMAND PID USER NODE NAME 
preload 385 root /data/VirtualBox/ScientificLinuxEnterprise6.vdi 
preload 385 root /data/VirtualBox/LinuxMint64bit.vdi

And having noted the above, why on earth was anything loading my virtual drives when I’m not even running VirtualBox at the moment?

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ps -ef | grep 385 

root 385 1 1 11:15 ? 00:00:11 /sbin/preload 
/var/cache/preload/prepared

A quick check of the internet showed that preload is a process to save boot time (how ironic) and that it can easily be disabled. So I disabled it. No more long boots now! To disable preload, run yast and select System Services (Runlevel).

Tick the Expert Mode radio button.
Scroll down to find boot.startpreload
At the bottom of the screen, uncheck the B box.
Click OK.

Cheers,
Norm.