meaning of regular flashes of hot lead
 

Hi,

one of machines which uses all 8-cores to do LL tests and does little else has a red led light on the front which flashes

on about every second. I was wondering if this was because after each iteration it writes to the HD.

Can anyone explain this thing for me?

What operating system does it run?

Is it memory constrained?

What do you mean by "little else"?

Try temporarily stopping prime95 (check CPU use goes to near zero) and see if the LED still flashes.

Chris

It's probably the HDD activity light. I'm a little surprised that it's red. If you have other LED's are they also red?

Find something that makes heavy use of your drive. This could be a disk cleanup utility or even just copying a big folder / file (a couple of GB if you have spare room) from somewhere to the desktop or something. (delete it after, obviously). See what the light does.

The only other standard LED I know of is the power LED and if that's blinking then that might be a concern. If you think it's not an HDD activity light then you might want to open your case and look around the motherboard for any other lights that are on or blinking.

Most of them are nothing to worry about: On my own motherboard, for example, I have one indicating which of the two BIOS'es I'm using, two indicating active PCI-E slots and one HDD activity light.

EDIT: I should mention that the HDD light does blink a good bit normally. It's probably not Prime95 saving iterations because those take a relatively long time to save. You could double-check that the setting is correctly set for 30 minutes (or whatever you prefer).

[QUOTE=TheMawn;404518]It's probably the HDD activity light. I'm a little surprised that it's red. If you have other LED's are they also red?[/QUOTE]

Colour doesn't matter; the "blinky lights" may.

Under Linux "vmstat -n 1" can help you correlate (along with other tools).

Can you trace the leads from the back of the LED, to the motherboard, and see what it is plugged into?

[QUOTE=kladner;404541]Can you trace the leads from the back of the LED, to the motherboard, and see what it is plugged into?[/QUOTE]

Almost without question, this is the HDD activity LED (as TheMawn suggested, and you inferred).

[CODE]procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu----
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa
0 0 0 10086992 73592 709352 0 0 0 0 352 1136 1 1 98 0
0 0 0 10087436 73592 709352 0 0 0 400 342 1188 1 1 99 0
0 0 0 10087364 73592 709352 0 0 0 0 334 1121 1 1 98 0
0 0 0 10087364 73592 709352 0 0 0 0 329 1105 1 1 98 0
0 0 0 10087364 73592 709352 0 0 0 0 351 1175 1 1 98 0
0 0 0 10087240 73592 709352 0 0 0 2 327 1132 1 1 98 0
0 0 0 10086992 73592 709352 0 0 0 0 355 1151 1 1 98 0
0 0 0 10086992 73600 709348 0 0 0 22 346 1196 1 1 97 2
0 0 0 10086868 73600 709352 0 0 0 0 331 1097 1 1 98 0
0 0 0 10086868 73600 709352 0 0 0 0 318 1107 1 1 99 0
0 0 0 10086992 73600 709352 0 0 0 0 370 1220 1 1 98 0
0 0 0 10086496 73600 709364 0 0 0 2 344 1170 1 1 98 0
0 0 0 10086496 73600 709524 0 0 0 0 367 1195 1 1 98 0
0 0 0 10084992 73608 709652 0 0 0 18 380 1423 2 1 96 2
0 0 0 10084760 73608 709512 0 0 0 0 402 1340 2 1 98 0
0 0 0 10082900 73608 709352 0 0 0 0 336 1089 2 1 98 0
0 0 0 10082776 73608 709352 0 0 0 0 395 1231 1 1 98 0
0 0 0 10082900 73608 709352 0 0 0 2 338 1154 1 1 98 0
0 0 0 10077688 73608 712272 0 0 0 0 472 1875 2 1 97 0
0 0 0 10077692 73616 712432 0 0 0 38 501 1792 2 1 95 1
[/CODE]

Thanks for all the replies guys. Had a few beers last night so was AWOL for a while.

Anyway, I've checked that the RED light I'm talking about was plugged into the HDD led socket on the front panel

connectors and it is. (I took it out, the RED light stopped flashing and I looked in the mobo manual to see if it's

the right two pins on the mobo and it is so I'm sure).

BTW, I'm sure I was supposed to make something of that page of output Chalsall posted but I'm not able to.

On some server motherboards there is a red light on the board itself which blinks when the machine is overheating (I have had some difficulty cooling my Xeon-D adequately, so got well acquainted with that light).

That might be it, but it's been doing it for months so if it is overheating it's not doing so enough to switch the machine off.