Hard drive activity when toggling Caps Lock / Num Lock?

I’ve noticed on Ubuntu MATE (15.04) computers that pressing the Caps Lock or Num Lock key causes some unnecessary hard drive activity to occur.

While watching iotop, it seems to be dconf-service that is causing it.

I haven’t yet observed if this happens on other distros, but it seems a bit unusual why I/O occurs on the root storage device.

Any ideas why?

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No, no idea why, but I wonder if this could instead be sent to ram.

Have you done a full system update?:

My systems stay up to date whenever regular updates are available.


While it’s not a massive issue, there is an older computer that gets I/O bottlenecked very easily, so toggling the key causes the hard drive to stress just a little bit.

Not sure how much data it’s writing, or where it’s going… :confused: