Re: Performance hit of frequent smartctl -A listings

John Gilmore <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.linux.utilities.smartmontools
Message-ID <[email protected]>
> > I was wondering if it is a good idea to have monitoring system call smartctl -A /dev/sdX somewhat frequently on my drives to monitor drives temperatures. I'm thinking 2-5 minutes interval, but I'm wondering how much of a performance hit on a drive is smartctl -A.

It probably varies on each drive; measure it and decide for yourself if
it's impacting your performance.

> > In fact, I would love to monitor most of the values in in smartctl -A output, which could lead to about 17 calls each 5 minutes. I know this is a very dumb way to go about it, and some intermediary caching mechanism is perhaps a must, but still, how costly are these listings?

Don't "cache" it.  Call smartctl -A once and parse the listing once,
to extract whatever 17 values you need.

	John

	

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