how to tell which process is accessing my disk?

Tyler Aviss tjaviss-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Thu Aug 28 16:02:38 UTC 2008


Cool.
I've been working with BSD servers more than Linux lately. I've found
many irritating inconstancies about how commands work, generally stuff
that doesn't work in BSD the same was a linux (missing flags, etc).

But one that that BSD *does* have is IO usage in top (and the
ever-useful systat command).
In Linux, pressing "m" in Top switches the memory usage bar on and
off. In BSD is switches between CPU and IO modes... very nice :-)

I'll have to try "iotop" in 'nix though. Disk IO is often a worse
culprit for crappy performance than CPU usage (and can contribute to
issues that appear CPU-related as well).


On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 9:22 AM, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 08:39:17PM -0400, Matt Price wrote:
>> i have a vague feeling i've sent this query out before, but i can't find
>> a record of it.  is there a tool that lets me see what process is
>> accessing the disk?  i just had a half-hour period where i couldn't use
>> my computer at ll because trackerd was monopolizing the disk.  i'd like
>> to be able to fire up a command-line tool that will tell me what's going
>> on in such cases.
>
> # apt-cache show iotop
> Package: iotop
> Priority: optional
> Section: admin
> Installed-Size: 88
> Maintainer: Paul Wise <pabs-8fiUuRrzOP0dnm+yROfE0A at public.gmane.org>
> Architecture: all
> Version: 0.2-2
> Depends: python (>= 2.5), python-support (>= 0.7.1)
> Filename: pool/main/i/iotop/iotop_0.2-2_all.deb
> Size: 12658
> MD5sum: c6858d7ae3ee179b26d509118951e457
> SHA1: 17c806efab5b9aedf791e8decd36b933a41ce362
> SHA256: 801c113b0166d6518e67dba2c4aab14ea0a9274097e90e7c1f9ca26e43d3edb5
> Description: simple top-like I/O monitor
>  iotop does for I/O usage what top(1) does for CPU usage. It watches I/O
>  usage information output by the Linux kernel (requires 2.6.20 or later)
>  and displays a table of current I/O usage by processes on the system.
>  Handy for answering the question "Why is my disk churning so much?".
> Homepage: http://guichaz.free.fr/iotop/
> Tag: admin::monitoring
>
> --
> Len Sorensen
> --
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-- 
Tyler Aviss
Systems Support
LPIC/LPIC-2
(647) 302-0942
--
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TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
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