And it was set up transparently by Ubuntu. By my disk keeps spinning up! Why?
The article has the debugging secret: a flag in proc that'll log which process is causing disk reads/writes. No more watching
vmstat 1 and guessing.The culprit turned out to be a few things, and then it was mostly fixed.
vim has as -n flag which is "No swap file, use memory only". But strace indicates that it fsync()s on writes anyway. :(It appears that people are well aware of this problem, but that doesn't do me any good.
And then Debian comes to my rescue!
apt-get source vim; apt-get build-dep vim and I have all the source and the exact setup used to build my vim binary.I can rip the code out, stick the patch in debian/patches,
dpkg-buildpackage -i -rfakeroot and it's all fixed.Watching this recompile it makes me feel a bit like a Gentoo user...
(PS: Dear mac users, this is the sort of thing that keeps me using Linux. If I were using the Other OS, I'd potentially not be able to fix this sort of thing. It makes me feel so powerless.)