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Legacy Forums => Experienced User Forum => Topic started by: sankar on April 21, 2002, 07:26:43 AM

Title: Continuous Disk Access in 5.1.2
Post by: sankar on April 21, 2002, 07:26:43 AM

I am using SME server 5.1.2. Sometimes the hardisk goes to
a crazy mode where the hardisk light is on for almost 10 to
15 minutes. Continuous acces to the disk by the server.During
that time I am not able to access the webmail/webserver. Is this
a normal behaviour?? Can anybody explain why this is happening?

Sankar

Title: Re: Continuous Disk Access in 5.1.2
Post by: Ari on April 21, 2002, 07:59:15 AM

Do you have software RAID?

Title: Re: Continuous Disk Access in 5.1.2
Post by: sankar on April 21, 2002, 09:39:11 AM

No I dont have Raid. No additional softwares were installed other
than the patch recommended by Mitel. I have 4 users using
the webmail. Two of the users have about 4 megabytes of email
data each. I noticed a funny behaviour when both of them
access the webmail at the same time this happens but not all
the time. Will there be any logfile where I can look for this
wierd disk activity???

Sankar

Title: Re: Continuous Disk Access in 5.1.2
Post by: Monty on April 21, 2002, 10:03:33 AM

My first guess is the Hard Drive is less than 100%. Try installing a different hard drive in the system to proove it's integrity. If you don't have another HD, do a back up, reinstall SME, restore the data and see if it continues to happen.

Title: Re: Continuous Disk Access in 5.1.2
Post by: steve on April 21, 2002, 12:06:50 PM

Is your machine lacking in horsepower or RAM. Do the load averages rise ?

Title: Re: Continuous Disk Access in 5.1.2
Post by: sankar on April 23, 2002, 09:06:49 AM

I have a PIII 1Ghz ,128Mb of RAM and 40Gb Hard disk (no bad sectors). I can
 increase the RAM to 256 or 512 but I have seen this HD light going crazy when
no body accessing the server also. It happens at a particualr point of time if
nobody is accessing the server or when two people access at the same time.

Sankar

Title: Re: Continuous Disk Access in 5.1.2
Post by: steve on April 23, 2002, 12:28:33 PM

Well its certainly not normal. I have a lesser spec cpu, 128 ram & 2 x 40GB with mainy additional apps running. I can load it up and create hard HD activity but it will still respond to say telent and web interface albeit slowy even with load averages above say 15. These normally sit around 1.

What happens to your load averages and swap space ?

Title: Re: Continuous Disk Access in 5.1.2
Post by: waltj on May 05, 2002, 10:57:48 AM

My SME periodically has excessive disk activity for no apparent reason- I've never found out why.  But it went totally berserk and had rapid disk activity almost continuously after I tried enabling webmail.  The server was so busiy it took *forever* to respond to the server-manager command to disable webmail, but when webmail was eventually stopped, the server returned to normal.
Something is seriously broken in the webmail system.  Perhaps it's related to the recent bug-fix changes to PHP?