[Sawfish] Re: High IO while config is open.

[GSR - FR <famrom@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,
Robert.Zenz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (2012-08-28 at 2025.46 +0200):
> Ah, yeah, thanks.
> 
> Please excuse me if I now dump this here, but I have a hard time
> figuring this one out. I have a 26MiB strace log just from ~15 seconds
> running and tried to analyze it with all my might. Though, I feel like
> poking into the dark...
> 
> Be warned, this is 26MiB+:
> strace -txo strace_output sawfish-config
> http://www.bonsaimind.org/tmp/strace_output

Next time gzip it, it goes down to less than 800KB. ;]

> I have also attached the output of 'strace -c sawfish-config'. I can see
> nothing too suspicious except these 'gettimeofday' and 'clock_gettime'
> calls...which are quite often in my opinion. Writes do not seem to be
> that frequent (roughly 320 calls), some of them seem to happen with
> quite big packages, but it still doesn't look like that this would
> explain the big disk activity I'm seeing.

There are thousands of 'read'. The one that appears a lot uses fd 10,
'grep "read(10" strace_output | wc -l' gives 116465, the file has
261125 lines.

Looking up what has generated a 10 gives some 'open's (that are closed
quickly) and 'inotify_init1'. Those read calls have
'\x73\x74\x72\x61\x63\x65\x5f\x6f\x75\x74\x70\x75\x74' which is the
string 'strace_output'.

My take is something is looking for changed files (check the
'inotify_add_watch' calls), and you are changing a file just where
that thing is looking at.

Could you try making redirections to /tmp/strace_output and check
again? Maybe something (gtk inner guts?) is causing part of the IO
noise.

GSR
 

-- 
Sawfish ML