I didn't mean to say it was spinning like a regular HD. What I was concerned about was it was clearly performing some thing for over several hours. Indicator light on panel indicated that. I was concerned because I've never seen it do this before. It was just unusual to me. And while I'm here, let me just say I responded the way I did because I was (I believe) given some instructions/feedback on how to investigate this situation through "Terminal". I am not good with terminal. There are things I don't understand which kinda requires I hope a friend (who is 2 hours from me) is in my area so I can catch him for a few to explain what something means. And unfortunately, his wife just had another baby, so I'm not likely going to see him for the foreseeable future-at least this Summer. I try to understand terminal, but I get frustrated very easily. So I give up.
Good to hear that the "problem" has disappeared.
The following thoughts arose in relation to the issue.
It should be clear that a user doesn't need to be knowledgeable about the terminal in the first instance to have it be useful in the case of a problem.
The issue in post #1 was about a process that appeared to be running which raised the question of "what might this be?"
The suggestion was to run
htop because that application shows what's running on a machine. One doesn't need to know everything about the output of htop in order for the output to be useful to them. If a user runs it, and presents the output to the forum, then readers who can understand the output well, could help the original poster to interpret the details. Then, hopefully expose what the issue is. Once the issue is known, then some form of managing it can be formulated.
Below is an example of the output of htop. The information it provides can be made clear to any interested viewer without inducing "terminal phobia".
The following are some explanations of the output with reference to the image of htop output below.
The top of the output shows 20 cpu cores which this machine runs, and the activity in each. Looking at the output shows that only cores 2, 6 and 10 are in use at the moment this htop output was made.
Directly below the cpu cores is a visual representation of the memory being used shown by "Mem" together with the numerical values. It shows that 2.07 gigabytes of memory are being used on a machine with 15.3 gigabytes of memory.
The "Swp" is the amount of "swap memory" that is being used. None is being used in a swap partition which 14.9 gigabytes in size. When the machine was first installed with a distro, a partition was created for swap memory which is used by the kernel if it decides there's a shortage of RAM to do what needs to be done. Not all machines have such swap partitions.
The "Uptime" value is the amount of time the machine has been running, which in this case is 13 hours, 17 minutes and 35 seconds.
Looking at the "Main" output, the display shows which processes are running on the machine. The values that are convenient to view for this particular issue are the CPU% and the MEM% because these values rise and fall as processes ebb and flow. If a process is running wild, it'll likely be using cpu and RAM in quantity.
The output on this htop instance shows that the listing of processes is ordered according to the MEM% value, which is clear from the highlighted color of "MEM%" on the titlebar. If one clicks on another variable, the ordering will usually change to show highest to lowest of that variable. Note that the values for memory in the VIRT, RES and SHR columns are in kilobytes unless with an M indicating megabytes or G indicating gigabytes.
The output shows 3.1% of memory is used by the waterfox browser, with extra memory used by its sub-processes.
Very little was happening on this machine when the htop output was screenshot. If, however, the machine was writing logs, much more memory would be being used, and the drive would be being accessed from RAM, and therefore the drive indicator light on the computer would have been flashing as the logs were being written. If htop was being run at that time, it would have shown that systemd was writing logs, and therefore, the flashing of the drive indicator light would not have been suspicious. The upshot is that the viewing of htop output at the time the drive indicator light was flashing could have been instructive about this particular issue.
The list of options at the bottom of the htop output show functions that htop can perform, one of which is "Kill". If a process is shown to be running wild in htop output, it can be killed by highlighting it and clicking on the "Kill" button. All being said, I think htop is very useful for issues such as those described in post #1 and is not particularly difficult to come to grips with. Hopefully these few observations can help dispel some reluctance to use linux's array of useful terminal apps. There's nothing to lose but one's ignorance
. Of course, one needs to feel ready for the adventure.
