Unexplained Disk Activity

[CTXSi]

I have an Asus RT-AC68U running 380.67. For the past few releases (since 3806.65 or 66) I have been seeing constant unexplained disk activity on my attached USB3 drive. The drive is a 3TB WD Red in a Vantec Nexstar case. The disk activity light is constantly blinking even though no devices on the network seem to be accessing the drive. Also at least one of the router CPU cores is close to 100% - the cores seem to alternate every few seconds. I have a USB2 drive (a 2TB Seagate in a Rosewill enclosure) that is fine - it spins down and up as needed and does not appear to have the same activity problem. I am not an expert, but I don't see anything in the log that would seem to explain why there is this much disk activity on the USB3 drive. I've had the drive and router for over a year and the problem only started within the past few months.

Thoughts? Any ideas on what might be causing this, or how to fix it?

Thanks,
CTXSi

 

[Fitz Mutch]

Thoughts?

If you use MiniDLNA media server, it's probably indexing your video library.

 

[richardeid]

You could SSH into the router and check top for process activity while this is occurring.

 

[CTXSi]

If you use MiniDLNA media server, it's probably indexing your video library.

That could be it. In researching this some more I saw the change back in March to enable the MiniDLNA status page at http://router.asus.com:8200/ and it says "* Media scan in progress". However the Media Server page of the router GUI says the MiniDLNA server is "Idle" and I don't see anything about it elsewhere in the logs.

If it is the MiniDLNA server then my guess is its because of the folder structure I've been using since back in my Tomato days. On Tomato's MiniDLNA implementation it was possible to select individual folders multiple levels deep via the web GUI (i.e., Drive -> Shared Folder name -> Pictures). The Asus GUI implementation seems to limit it to Drive -> Shared Folder. Is there a way to specify folder and/or exclude folders from the MiniDLNA scan? The server is probably scanning dozens of years of Word documents, presentations, etc... that it doesn't need to scan. If I can't change it in the GUI is there a settings file that can be edited to specify the include/exclude folders?

 

[CTXSi]

You could SSH into the router and check top for process activity while this is occurring.

Thank you for the tip. Yes, using the "top" command I can see MiniDLNA reporting between 29-40% of my CPU usage.

 

[amplatfus]

Thank you for the tip. Yes, using the "top" command I can see MiniDLNA reporting between 29-40% of my CPU usage.

You could you "htop" instead of "top".

 

[CTXSi]

You could you "htop" instead of "top".

When I try "htop" it says command not found - must not be in the builds by default.

 

[richardeid]

When I try "htop" it says command not found - must not be in the builds by default.

Not sure if you've installed Entware, but if you have you can install htop.

opkg install htop

I'm not sure if Optware has htop but if you don't have entware you could probably try:

ipkg install htop

For just the purpose of what you needed, though, top works just fine. htop is always good to have around, though.

 

[Fitz Mutch]

... is there a settings file that can be edited to specify the include/exclude folders?

My router has Entware-ng, so I use the MiniDLNA package from Entware-ng. The config file is here:
nano /opt/etc/minidlna.conf

However, Asuswrt-Merlin has MiniDLNA too. You can follow the wiki for custom scripts and configs. And could override the default settings, like this:
cp -p /etc/minidlna.conf /jffs/configs/.
nano /jffs/configs/minidlna.conf
service restart_dms

Now, I've got the biggest video library, right here. I've had to rebuild the MiniDLNA database a couple times for various reasons, and there's a trick to prevent the router from freezing/crashing due to high CPU load from scanning all the videos. You have to start with a small number of videos in the media directory. Then, very slowly add more videos to the media directory, so inotify can automatically discover the new videos. Otherwise the CPU gets overloaded.