I'm troubleshooting a 10-disc array that no longer sleeps.  My parity drive sleeps, but my data drives are all almost always kept running by reads.  Is there an easy way to log (or watch) my system's read activity for, say, an hour...that will give me some insight into what process/program is so routinely rechecking my files?  This has been going on for weeks now, and it's driving me nuts.  I've tried playing a shell game with disabling my plugins- it only misled me and never led to a solution.  Thanks.

install inotifywait

Thank you for the advice dgaschk.  The plugin causing the problem was, ironically, [glow=green,2,300]cache_dirs[/glow].  The instant I issued the command to turn it off "cache_dirs -q" the reads stopped.  I removed its entry from my go file and restarted my server just for good measure.  It's been fine ever since. 

Are you sure you're using the most recent version of cache_dirs ?

 

I've not seen that problem with cache_dirs on either of my servers => I'd think the issue you're seeing is that you have more files than you can cache in the memory you have.    How much memory in your server?  ... and how many files are you caching ?

 

And cache dirs worked wonderfully for me, too....until I started messing around with Plex.

 

My server has 8Gb of memory.  As far as the number of files I'm caching, I don't really know.  It was being launched with the default command line.  Aside from the increase in files on my CACHE drive (as a result of installing Plex a month ago), there shouldn't have been a significant increase in the quantity on the data drives.  It's a 20Tb setup right now- which I doubt is among the larger around here.  As for the version#, I'm thinking it was 1.5.  If memory serves, I got it from Joe's signature line.  I messaged him regarding things I could have potentially done during the Plex setup that might have damaged the install somehow.  I'm first to admit I don't know my way around Linux, and at the advice of Plex forum members, I issued some command lines I cannot recall, uninstalled the C-compiler package, and goodness knows what else, but Joe didn't respond, so I removed cache-dirs, reinstalled the c-compiler package and left Plex uninstalled for the moment.  Now, my server seems normal- things park/sleep as they always did, and I didn't have to give up my ssmtp package (email notifications) to placate Plex...which I was growing to hate, anyways.

Interesting summary.  I'd certainly think with 8GB of RAM you'd be unlikely to exceed the amount of RAM  needed to cache all the directories.

 

My backup server has 8GB and caches about 300,000 files with no problem.

 

Note:  If you simply open a share in Windows Explorer; do a "Select All";  then right-click and select Properties, it will (eventually) show the number of files in that share.    Do that for all your shares; add the numbers; and you'll know how many files you're trying to cache.

 

The issue may not be the number of files that you're caching, but something about the way in which they're being altered by Plex.  Not sure what that interaction might be ... but if you exclude all folders that Plex uses from directory caching, it may very well resolve the problem.    Just add -e "foldertoexlude" as part of your cache_dirs command in the GO file.  Note you can have as many of the -e parameters as you need.

 

i.e. to exlude folders named PlexData and PlexTemp your cache_dirs line would look like this:

 

cache_dirs -e "PlexData" -e "PlexTemp" -w

 

It never appeared that Plex was altering any of my files.  It wasn't unusual to come home and find my array awake (naturally) but with my main screen showing 100k reads on a drive- with about TEN writes.  BUT- I think you have hit upon something....I just did as you mentioned- not for my shares but for the Plex folder on my cache drive.  I wasn't surprised that Plex took days to index everything, and I knew it had amassed several Gb of data on my cache drive, but I never gave it much thought.  After all, it's my CACHE drive- I could spare the space, and never cared if it parked.  (Although I didn't know cache_dir also cached IT)..

 

JUST the PLEX subfolders (tower\cache\appdata\plex......)

 

Files:        246,000

FOLDERS: [glow=red,2,300]419,000[/glow]

Occupying 7.6Gb

 

And honestly, I'm not sure THAT'S a reliable count.  A few days ago, I was attempting to back up my cache drive (to preserve my sabnzbd/sickbeard setup mainly) and was actually UNABLE to copy/paste the appdata folder within Windows....until I more specifically backed up JUST the /appdata/sabnzbd  and appdata/sickbeard subfolders seperately (leaving off poison-pill-plex)......so there MAY be even more than that!  (At the time, Windows choked on the 255+ character pathways that Plex has apparently created)