File Activity Plugin - How can I figure out what keeps spinning up my disks?


dlandon

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4 hours ago, dlandon said:

It's an unassigned slot in the array.  I've made an update that will ignore a non-existent disk.

Well that's a quick turnaround!  Thanks!  I can confirm that it now skips over the missing disk2 and works fine unless I try to enable cache drives, in which case I'm getting the same error for `/mnt/cache2` now.  I do have two cache disks, but they're in a pool so there isn't a second mount point (assuming I haven't set this up weird (see screenshot below)).  I guess I should have looked more thoroughly at disks.ini and I might have seen that coming too.

Screenshot 2020-12-26 230446.png

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4 hours ago, Sammy1Am said:

Well that's a quick turnaround!  Thanks!  I can confirm that it now skips over the missing disk2 and works fine unless I try to enable cache drives, in which case I'm getting the same error for `/mnt/cache2` now.  I do have two cache disks, but they're in a pool so there isn't a second mount point (assuming I haven't set this up weird (see screenshot below)).  I guess I should have looked more thoroughly at disks.ini and I might have seen that coming too.

Screenshot 2020-12-26 230446.png

Update and try again.

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6 hours ago, Alex.b said:

All my shares are set to "Cache Prefer".

@Alex.b

Very bad idea. That is going to make it try to put all your data on cache and move all your data to cache.

 

Go to Tools - Diagnostics and attach the complete Diagnostics ZIP file to your NEXT post in this thread.

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12 minutes ago, Marc_G2 said:

So I was hoping this plugin could help me determine what was pinging my Cache SSD every 30 minutes (almost on the dot) which was preventing my system from going to sleep.  But sadly the plugin doesn't detect anything.  Do you have any advice?   I already posted on the Dynamix thread.  

 

 

nas-ng-diagnostics-20210428-1559.zip 102 kB · 0 downloads

I suspect its because you have the following set for smart polling.  poll_attributes="1800" which will be 30mins. What is the time for your sleep? Try changing poll to 3600 to see if that fixes issue.

 

 

Edited by SimonF
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1 hour ago, SimonF said:

I suspect its because you have the following set for smart polling.  poll_attributes="1800" which will be 30mins. What is the time for your sleep? Try changing poll to 3600 to see if that fixes issue.

That's a good theory, but it looks like changing that setting didn't make a difference.  I did recently change my default spin down time from 60 to 30 mins.  But increasing it to 45 min didn't fix it either.  For now I'll try a reboot to see if a setting isn't properly getting applied immediately or something.   This was never a problem when prior to updating to 6.9.2.  I only made a handful of small changes since that update.  But I can't think of anything else that would cause this.

Edited by Marc_G2
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10 minutes ago, Marc_G2 said:

That's a good theory, but it looks like changing that setting didn't make a difference.  I did recently change my default spin down time from 60 to 30 mins.  But increasing it to 45 min didn't fix it either.  For now I'll try a reboot to see if a setting isn't properly getting applied immediately or something.   This was never a problem when prior to updating to 6.9.2.  I only made a handful of small changes since that update.  But I can't think of anything else that would cause this.

What is your sleep timer, may be best to raise a separate thread for this? I believe there have been some issues with S3 Sleep plugin on 6.9

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14 minutes ago, SimonF said:

What is your sleep timer, may be best to raise a separate thread for this? I believe there have been some issues with S3 Sleep plugin on 6.9

At the moment it's set to 35 min after disks are spun down.  I'll create a new thread if I can't figure it out in the next day or so.

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8 hours ago, acosmichippo said:

probably a noob question... is there any way to see what process actually opened files captured by this plugin?

 

just now I saw that something opened a bunch of music videos. i assume it was either plex or radarr, i just don't know why.

No, only the file activity.  Not who created the activity.

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1 hour ago, KnifeFed said:

Would it be possible to implement that? It would be infinitely more helpful to know the actual process responsible for the activity.

File activity uses inotify to monitor file activity.  There is no way to know which process accesses the file with inotify.

 

I am changing the inotify events to (file access, file open, file create, file delete, and file modify) for more activities to help in identifying which files are changing.  The downside is this will generate a lot of log activity, but might give more information on what is changing.  I've been reluctant to monitor too much, because working through a large log can be overwhelming.  I'm researching ways to be able to better manage finding what is relevant in the log.

 

It won't log directory access events because the log will be unmanageable.  The best way to handle this is to install the Cache Dirs plugin and only specify shares to be cached.  Don't use the Cache Dirs default settings.  It has a nasty habit of caching everything, which in many cases is way too much.  If it is set up correctly, directory accesses should not spin up disks.

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I've update the plugin with the following changes:

  • Add modify file activity.
  • Don't show directory access in the log.  The log becomes unmanageable with all the directory entries and doesn't provide any additional information.
  • Settable option to log events by disk or share.  The share logging should help identify who is accessing files based on the share being used.
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