Re: Disk activity

* Michael Campbell (Sat, 25 Jun 2011 12:17:54 -0400)
> I believe workrave does flash some data about every minute.

Actually every second. Workrave writes to workrave.ini (in Windows 
portable mode) three times per second in 1 KB chunks.

Normally it would use the registry on Windows for that. Since there is 
no registry on Linux, I suspect the same behaviour on Linux.

> In theory, yes, every disk access can shorten its life. In practice,
> the amount of I/O workrave is adding is infinitesimally small and I
> wouldn't estimate that you should worry about premature disk failure
> due to it.

Especially on thumb drives this is concerning and it also has 
performance impacts.

There is a problem with Workrave's design in this regard. An application 
should not write to its configuration file unless a human has changed 
something in the preferences. Maybe this is a consequence of GTK's 
"'instant-apply' for all preferences" that Rob Caelers mentioned.

Anyway, writing a file to disk 86400 times per day (without a single 
change) is just madness.

Thorsten


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