# Source of syncer's activity



## Itys (Feb 21, 2013)

Hello,

I'm trying to find the source of a strange behaviour in a 9.0-RELEASE system:
gstat reports write peaks of 11000-15000 kBps in 300-400 writes per second for 15 seconds about every minute. The device is around 100% busy during that time and I see some zombie processes which disappear after that.

*top -SH -s1 -mio* shows me a "syncer" process with corresponding values every time the event occurs. I'm stuck at this point. From what I read in syncer(4), it should do it's work twice a minute. I verified the sysctls and they do have the noted values of 30, 29 and 28.

Apart from syncer appearing only once minute in that way, I really wonder why it is syncing that much and especially what it is syncing. The system itself should not have any notable disk IO.


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