I use Fedora 9 with KDE4. Recently I have noticed that the system’s hard disk is continuously being accessed. Some times it leads to slow system response.

So I wanted to know which process writes continuously. With my colleague’s help I used SystemTap

probe syscall.write {

printf(“%s=====> %s\n”,execname(),argstr);

}

And run this script by
stap -vv write.stp

Partial output from the script is

konsole=====> 30, “k”, 1236
konsole=====> 25, “\30\1\5.\4\2\5\6\1″, 4
konsole=====> 31, “”, 1
konsole=====> 30, “k”, 1236
konsole=====> 25, “\4\5\5.\4\2\5\6\1″, 4
konsole=====> 31, “”, 1
konsole=====> 30, “k”, 1236
konsole=====> 25, “\2\5.\4\2\5\6\1″, 4
konsole=====> 31, “”, 1
konsole=====> 30, “k”, 1236
konsole=====> 25, “\4\7\5.\4\2\5\6\1″, 4
konsole=====> 31, “”, 1
konsole=====> 30, “k”, 1236
konsole=====> 25, “h\4\5.\4\2\5\6\1″, 4
konsole=====> 31, “”, 1
konsole=====> 30, “k”, 1236
konsole=====> 25, “<\1\5.\4\2\5\6\1″, 4
konsole=====> 31, “”, 1
konsole=====> 30, “k”, 1236
konsole=====> 25, “\20\6\5.\4\2\5\6\1″, 4
konsole=====> 31, “”, 1
konsole=====> 30, “k”, 1236
konsole=====> 25, “\4\2\5.\4\2\5\6\1″, 4
konsole=====> 31, “”, 1
konsole=====> 30, “k”, 1236
konsole=====> 25, “\7\5.\4\2\5\6\1″, 4
konsole=====> 31, “”, 1
konsole=====> 30, “k”, 1236
konsole=====> 25, “\4\4\5.\4\2\5\6\1″, 4
konsole=====> 31, “”, 1
konsole=====> 30, “k”, 1236
konsole=====> 25, “`\1\5.\4\2\5\6\1″, 4
konsole=====> 31, “”, 1
konsole=====> 30, “k”, 1236
konsole=====> 25, “4\6\5.\4\2\5\6\1″, 4
konsole=====> 31, “”, 1
konsole=====> 30, “k”, 1236

So KDE konsole application keeps on writing into some tmp files. I don’t know why konsole keeps on writing. Somebody from KDE could answer/fix this?

But I am still not sure whether this one leads to continuous hard disk access or some other application is responsible for that.