B3 always busy, system temperature ~60°C

[Mirador]

Hi Folks,

My B3/Wifi usually works as a squeezebox server, some downloads occasionally and data storage.
Although the quite low useage it seems busy all the time, harddisk is spinning, temperature is high (ca. 60°C)

Even when I switch off ALL services the thing is running like mad, temperature not lowering any bit.

Its place is quite unusual, the small space under a wooden wardrobe. Air circulation is very bad there, but using a different space isnt quite satisfying either.
Is it possible to put it in a mode so the harddisk stops running and producing heat all the time? Frankly I don´t really understand why it does that in the first place...

Any help appreciated, especially since it might considerably increase life expectancy of my B3 or its HDD

Kind Regards,

Mirador

[Binkem]

Linux systems keep acessing the HDD regularly, so as long as your B3 is running the disk won't stop spinning. With B3 being a fanless design it depends on natural airflow to keep it cool. You may be able to cool your B3 using a fan, but that will create noise unfortunately.
Maybe someone else has a bright idea?

[Cheeseboy]

Hi Mirador, and welcome to the forum!

Put it in a place with natural ventilation/airflow. It makes so little noise, you should be able to have it in your bedroom. I read recently on this forum that the main heat concern about the Bubba server is the HDD. The circuit board can take a lot more heat than you would think. 60 is running it a bit high for the HDD, and will probably shorten it's life. Better put it in a a better spot...

I have mine on a window sill, and even though it is currently very hot where I'm living, the HDD temp normally keeps under 45. The other day I copied >500 GiB of movies from the B3 over FTP to a USB device. The HDD temperature raised to 52 after about 6 hours. I have never even got close to 60. I''ve got a 2 TB WD green.

Best regards,

Cheeseboy

[Mirador]

Thanks for the comments so far.
I know that the place is very bad for the device - on my desk the B3 has just about 45°C which seems to be normal.
I just refuse to understand that it needs HDD access all the time even when all services are stopped and it is "doing" nothing. What is it good for? Actually it has some RAM integrated and I could live with the little delay it needs for HDD spinup.
If there is nothing to be done about it, well then it is so.
For me it is not possible to put it in another place for different reasons. A vent is also out of the question. The only solution I can think of then is attaching some metal that works as a heat sink...

Or is there anyone who could tell me how to find out about running processes and how to kill them?

Thanks for your help,

Mirador

[Cheeseboy]

Hi again,

It is a Unix-like system. It is not designed to stop using the HDD.
Quick google gave me this:
http://nabeelc.blogspot.com/2007/01/deb ... ntral.html

Perhaps worth having a look. Or... Get a SSD drive. Those can apparently take much more temps.

Cheers,

Cheeseboy

[Ubi]

If you're wondering what processes are messing with your machine, you need to run "top" from the command line as root. Look at the load on top of the screen, and at the specifications of that load (%idle, %wait etc), and then you know.

[Mirador]

Hi Ubi,

thanks for the information, although not being quite the Linux expert I managed to run top

top - 07:14:51 up 3 days, 15:31, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05
Tasks: 84 total, 1 running, 83 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.7%us, 0.7%sy, 0.0%ni, 98.7%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 515244k total, 492116k used, 23128k free, 50844k buffers
Swap: 1048572k total, 2308k used, 1046264k free, 246692k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
13309 squeezec 20 0 76688 65m 4100 S 0.7 13.0 13:04.03 squeezecenter-s
1513 mysql 20 0 136m 54m 3756 S 0.3 10.8 12:38.42 mysqld
16563 karsten 20 0 9900 1584 1064 S 0.3 0.3 0:00.31 sshd
16571 root 20 0 2704 1188 940 R 0.3 0.2 0:02.55 top
1 root 20 0 2072 588 556 S 0.0 0.1 0:05.05 init
2 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd
3 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:47.46 ksoftirqd/0
4 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:04.93 kworker/0:0
6 root -2 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:33.35 rcu_kthread
7 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khelper
8 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:01.08 kworker/u:1
136 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:01.42 sync_supers
138 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.04 bdi-default
140 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kblockd
146 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ata_sff
157 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.01 khubd
161 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 md
177 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 rpciod
188 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:05.28 kswapd0
238 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 fsnotify_mark
240 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 aio
249 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 nfsiod
255 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 crypto
360 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 scsi_eh_0
363 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 scsi_eh_1
366 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:07.48 kworker/u:2
374 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 orion_spi
379 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 mtdblock0
384 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 mtdblock1
389 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 mtdblock2
472 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:03.31 kjournald
514 root 16 -4 2360 592 464 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.14 udevd
574 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 mv_crypto
593 root 18 -2 2356 644 476 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.05 udevd
594 root 18 -2 2356 340 316 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 udevd
624 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 cfg80211
700 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:02.67 flush-8:0
750 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kdmflush
842 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.09 kjournald
1003 root 20 0 58212 4624 3600 S 0.0 0.9 0:00.14 php5-cgi
1008 root 20 0 1516 296 264 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 startpar
1034 root 20 0 28560 1204 924 S 0.0 0.2 0:05.26 rsyslogd
1082 root 20 0 67240 14m 7660 S 0.0 3.0 2:11.83 php5-cgi
1083 root 20 0 69668 18m 8300 S 0.0 3.6 0:12.39 php5-cgi
1100 nobody 20 0 2804 824 660 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.73 dnsmasq
1137 root 20 0 3800 460 388 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 dhclient
1196 root 20 0 63660 7804 3992 S 0.0 1.5 0:16.27 apache2
1201 www-data 20 0 20984 2652 448 S 0.0 0.5 0:00.06 apache2
1208 root 20 0 2472 800 624 S 0.0 0.2 0:01.95 cron
1220 messageb 20 0 3724 508 328 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 dbus-daemon
1232 avahi 20 0 3368 1120 816 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.24 avahi-daemon
1233 avahi 20 0 3236 436 244 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 avahi-daemon


It seems to be running smoothly, >98% idle
Would reducing the swap space to 0 be a solution? How can this be done?
Upgrade in physical memory?

It is not designed to stop using the HDD

Well, still don´t get it why it is using HDD in the first place

regards,

Mirador

[Ubi]

Your assumption that the machine is using swap space is incorrect. Besides, if it were using swap space, it needs it and turning swap off will break your OS in some glorious way. Either case: do not touch swap.

From your top output, it is shown your machine is not busy with anything in particular. The HD is working because it needs to read and write to the HD, such as update the log files. This is normal behavior for a linux machine and it should not adversely affect operation. The fact that your machine is running hot is more likely the result of bad ventilation that a faulty product. If you really want to get rid of this, I suggest you replace your HD with a SSD (If you don't need a lot of drive space that is) You generally get your money back for the cost of the SSD via the electricity bill within 2 years.

[Mirador]

I was never thinking the product was faulty.
Just didn´t know what was going on inside Didn´t know about the need for constant logging for example...
Is it possible to completely switch off logging? Or anything else that normally accesses HDD regularly but I could maybe live without?
Anyway, I am considering getting an SSD and have the big HDD operate externally.
Thanks for the advice,
Regards,
Mirador

[Cheeseboy]

Hi again,

You might be able to tweak the Bubbas to make them spin down the HDD, but is going to take some effort and will not be done in an afternoon. For instance, you might be able to mount the /var filesystem (where all the logs are) on a volatile RAM file system. Or disable all logging. You can adjust the swap behaviour with swappiness settings (although your swap usage is very low in the top output).

But do you really want to? The whole reason of having a Linux/Unix system is that it is stable and recoverable. If there are issues there are log files to examine in order to identify the problem. Basically, it is not windows, but something that has been used in critical production environments since the 1970s.
If this is not what you wanted, perhaps you bought the wrong product?

Cheers,

Cheeseboy

[johannes]

I can comment on the temperature / hardware issues, to clear this up:

The HDD is specified to 60 degrees operation, but generally the lower the better. The other electronics won't care until they reach 90 or 100 or so, so they are no issue. An SSD would solve your issue for two reasons: Lower heat dissapation => lower overall temperature, and no moving parts => less sensitive.

Furthermore, a metal piece would probably not do much good. The problem is the surrounding temperature under your closet. If it's high enough natural air convection (due to temp difference against B3) will stop completely. And with less air movement, the cooling of your closet space will also suffer.

A vent would definitly help, and it probably doesn't need to be large. One small opening under and one over B3 would improve things.

[dna_watt]

I don't have this issue with my B3, however, I do have it with my PVR's (as they are installed inside audio cabinets and are also passively cooled). There are a wide range of AV cooling devices that are quiet (some are even temperature controlled). One site is: activethermal *dot* com

Remember - Google is your friend - Try searching for "AV cooler"