continuous disk activity from GNOME

[Danny Yee]

I asked:
> > Is this normal?  Is there any way to stop it (it can't be good for
> > the drive)?
 
PFJ wrote:
> Is it normal? Depends on lots of things. Biggest two is finding the app
> causing the hammering and reporting it into bugzilla (if it is a bug
> that is), the second is the amount of memory and swap space you have.
> Lots of both and you'll get very few hammer sessions, very little and
> they'll increase.

512 MB of memory and 1.5 GB of swap.

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        514528     509008       5520          0     196440     150124
-/+ buffers/cache:     162444     352084
Swap:      1493524      51344    1442180

It's some part of the GNOME desktop causing the activity, since disk
activity stops when I'm not logged in and starts when I log in, even
before any applications are started.  But top doesn't show anything
useful -- any idea which GNOME component would be doing disk accesses
every 5 seconds or so?

Danny.