Excessive disk cache activity.

[Magnus Ahltorp]

> - When I would ls an AFS cell (I used stacken.kth.se cell because Yale
> does not have an AFS cell yet) I would get a lot of disk activity (the
> drive did an excessive amount of seeking very rapidly).
>
> This is obviously cache-related, but it is not a good sound (too much
> seeking in a small area of the drive). This seeking activity would
> continue for almost a minute after each simple ls.

It could be the precreation of cache nodes, but then it shouldn't just
happen after each ls, but rather a while after arlad was started. You
haven't enabled xfs debugging or something?

> Also, the operations I was doing (just ls'ing the same small directory a
> few times) should not have required using the on-disk cache at all after
> the first attempt.

It should not write something to the cache, but it will certainly read
from it, since you repeated the ls command.

> How do I add things to the root directory? (arlad -t seemed to mount the
> milko server (it was registering GetRoot fetches), but "ls /afs"
> returned "Not a directory" and I couldn't figure out how one goes about
> actually placing things in the volume.

If you have run "volmgr gen-ontop-vol <partition-name> <volume-id>",
you should have a volume with a top directory. Don't expect too much
though, milko is not much more than a proof-of-concept, and it will be
rewritten.

/Magnus
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