High Disk I/O on server reboot

hard driveio

A CentOS 5.8 machine has high Disk I/O upon starting up. The processes taking up disk IO are kmirrord, kjournald and pdflush. I have done the performed the following:

1) Mounted the filesystem with noatime parameter.
2) Linux kernel version < 2.6.20 and hence iotop does not report. I enabled block_dump and it suggests that kmirrord, kjournald and pdflush are extensively reading/writing to disk.

Server load also goes up with this high disk utilization. This continues for a while (around half an hour) and the the system is then back to normal.

Is there anything else I can check further?

Best Answer

Check with iotop. It works on CentOS/RHEL 5.8 just fine. See here.

Does this happen with every reboot? A warm-boot?

Is this server on physical hardware? a VPS? A virtual machine?

How long has this been a problem?