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The disk activity monitor widget in KDE (Debian) shows constant HDD write around 12 MiB/s, when I run iotop, there is nothing that would be constantly using HDD. When I run atop, at first PAG is red and blinking but after about 3 seconds disappears, when i run free -h, I get:

 total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 7.7Gi 2.2Gi 3.0Gi 1.1Gi 2.5Gi 4.2Gi Swap: 7.9Gi 0.0Ki 7.9Gi

Any idea what can be causing this or how to find out?

Also, i tried to clear the cache, it cleared to 1.5 Gi but after less than 5 minutes it was back to 2.5 Gi as shown above. Also i am thinking that Debian is using quite a lot of memory given that only firefox with the stackexchange window is open.

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  • Please try htop. Commented Sep 3, 2022 at 15:10
  • @ArtemS.Tashkinov htop shows no hdd activity. It might be a bug in the activity monitor HDD activity, now it is showin disk write access 80MiB/s... When I restart the computer, it is quiet and sometimes it appears after a while... But I just want to make sure that there is no malicious activity going on. Commented Sep 23, 2022 at 13:07
  • I've no clue to be honest. I've thought about swapping in/out but according to your output your swap isn't used at all. Another idea could be dirty buffers flushing but the requires copying tons of data. Please try using sudo fatrace. Commented Sep 23, 2022 at 13:38

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For a freshly installed system, it can be ext4lazyinit kernel thread allocating inode tables in background (e.g. see here).

To confirm, try run sudo blktrace -d /dev/myblockdevname -o - | blkparse -i -.

Interesting, that in my case iotop was less helpful than blktrace: because it was not reporting data for the [ext4lazyinit] kernel thread (iotop 0.6, kernel 6.14.8-1).

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