Truly bad: gnome-settings-daemon + pulseaudio causing laptop HDD death

[blackshard]

Hi all,

I'm using fedora 11 x64 with all updates on place.
I'm really pissed off because I found that my laptop hard disk is parking the heads every 10 seconds circa, and gnome-settings-daemon is trying to start pulseaudio daemon every 10 seconds circa.

This causes a deleterious parking/unparking job on the heads and raising the infamous Load_Cycle_Count HDD smart parameter. There was a famous issue with this counter (ubuntu people should remember this): manufacturers tell you that you disk is gonna die when it reaches a value between 300k-600k.

How I found the issue?
Installed atop, I saw that kjournald was invoked every 10 seconds, so I did:

> echo 1 >/proc/sys/vm/block_dump

This command enables dumping of writes on block devices that you can see invoking dmesg. So I was able to identify that gnome-settings-daemon is writing periodically to a file (pulse-shm-xxxxxx).
I got tons of lines like this:

gnome-settings-(11959): dirtied inode 188241 (pulse-shm-2392701627) on tmpfs

Nice to see, pulseaudio is back...

I killed gnome-settings-daemon and FINALLY got no periodic writes to disk.
Now I want to ask everyone, gnome devs, pulseaudio devs, and normal people, how the hell I can sort this thing out? Can I finally disable pulseaudio? I dunno why PackageKit wants to tore my system apart if I try to uninstall pulseaudio.

Bad bad bad guys, really bad.

[movieman]

Tmpfs is a RAM disk, isn't it?

BTW, I haven't seen a load_cycle_count problem on my netbook running UNR 9.10.

[blackshard]

Nope, it isn't.

gnome-settings-daemon creates and removes such files every 10 seconds in the try to start pulseaudio.

[Zhick]

Nope, it isn't.

Uhm yes it is? But swap might be used as well if you're running low on memory.

[blackshard]

This is the entry in mtab:

tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs rw,rootcontext="system_ubject_r:tmpfs_t:s0" 0 0

However I solved the problem, I just followed the guide here:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=225660&highlight=gnome-settings-daemon

and i finally reinstalled pulseaudio with a working setup.
It still eats 30% of cpu cycles doing nothing, but at least I can use alsa output plugins easily without hanging the system.

Also I monitored filesystem writes and gnome-settings-daemon is no more writing that file on disk (again, it was a disk write and not a ramdisk write).
Also unistalling pulseaudio with yum remove uninstall didn't solve the problem, I had to reinstall it.

[zika]

Did You try adding a following line in /etc/fstab?

tmpfs        /tmp         tmpfs    defaults    0    0

It helped me a lot in cutting disk access ... Thant way /tmp is in RAM and the only big problem is when You want to deal with large files in /tmp ...

[blackshard]

Thank you very much, I'll try the suggestion, I think it will be helpful too!