Using iotop, I am discovering some very interesting reasons why my (very nice, rather expensive) / mount nvme drive is getting worn down by writes to just 71% health in a few years!
As the picture shows, I left my system running overnight with iotop going, and I'm seeing that gnome-software and opera are using up a ton of my writes all the time. I don't have automatic updates enabled, and even if I did, I don't even have 800+gb of data on my / drive. This is truly astronomical levels of writing going on, and I think it largely explains why my other nvme, which is non-root, is still at 94% disk health despite being explicitly used for large batch file jobs by me.
Can anyone help me whip gnome-software, zorin, or opera into shape, to extend the life of my nvme drive? I'm not sure where to start investigating these big, complex programs to find out what part of their configuration is causing these writes.
A correction to what I earlier said: I do have gnome-software automatic updates enabled. I have gone ahead and disabled it... but can it be that this is really responsible for such a large write in a single night? I'm a little shocked, but I can believe it if others can confirm they've also seen this behavior... just something to be aware of I guess...
Using iotop as a starting point is a good idea, but it is not conclusive, either. I would use S.M.A.R.T. to examine and also test the drive using smartctl, for a deeper dive.
With Gnome, I would put Gnome-software higher on the suspect list than the shell, because it has continuous activity that affects NAND, whereas the Shell can have a lot of write activity, but a much smaller NAND footprint.
I will look into caching. There are actually many kinds of caching a modern browser does though, I think - standard resource caching, page sleep probably uses another cache, update caching... I'm just not sure which one of these was going off to such a high degree while the computer sat idle overnight!
good question. Normally I prefer .deb installs for all my software, but it looks like that's not available for ZorinOS 18:
adam@AHPC:/var/log$ flatpak list | grep opera
Opera com.opera.Opera 133.0.5932.60 stable flathub system
adam@AHPC:/var/log$ opera -v
Command 'opera' not found, but can be installed with:
sudo snap install opera
I have switched over to .deb version of Firefox and will monitor how this behaves. But the bigger question is what to do about gnome-software. Think I should take this up with the GNOME support team, or do we still not know enough?
I believe the first action is to use smartctl to establish what needs to be addressed, first.
It is possible that Gnome Software has a memory leak. But first, you should check the drive with a S.M.A.R.T. test to get actual raw data to verify whether it is seeing extreme write cycles.
Iotop can be misleading in this regard. It suggested a possible issue - Let's verify that there really is a real issue, first.
You could try that, but if they will help You ... This Gnome Version is no longer supported by Gnome itself. When there would be something to fix, Zorin would have to do that.
But I think, You should follow @Aravisian's Advice first.
I'm sorry, I should have mentioned that I took a look at the actual SMART data, too. Indeed, the drive writes are much, much higher on the affected drive. iotop didn't tell me drive health; that I got from SMART.
So it's just a matter of figuring out what did/is doing it.
I can report that Firefox is doing much, MUCH less writing than the flatpak version of Opera. I am now going back to Opera on the .deb version and I'll check that next.
I'm also monitoring all the time to see if gnome-software decides to take another massive ■■■■ on my drive with iotop.
