The tool you wished exists actually does: iotop
You heard it here last, to use sog’s catchphrase. Haven’t you always wanted to track down the runaway process that was sucking up all your disk I/O? Now you can, with iotop. It’s a simple Python script, not even a full-out application. iotop uses the I/O accounting in newer 2.6 kernels >=2.6.20 (check whether /proc/self/io exists to see whether you’ve got it enabled) and requires at least Python 2.5 for AF_NETLINK sockets. Here’s what it looks like (click for larger image):
It shows overall disk read and write in MB/s. Per-process, it shows disk read and write speeds as well as percentage of time spent swapping in and percentage of time spent while waiting on I/O. In other words, it rocks.
To install it on Gentoo:
emerge iotop
You might need to sync your tree because I just added it. It’s still got testing keywords, so if you’re running stable, do this:
echo =dev-lang/python-2.5* >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
echo sys-process/iotop >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
Someone hasn’t heard of atop.
Rudd-O
June 26, 2008 at 1:55 pm
I installed it to take a look, and honestly I find it pretty ugly and harder to use with the way it displays things. For example its column labels are nonobvious, and less readable because they’re sort-of-abbreviated and have no spaces, and the same goes for the lack of separation between the units and the numbers in the data.
Donnie Berkholz
June 26, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Wow, this is exactly what I’ve been wanting all this time!
Regarding kernel options: I enabled TASKSTATS and its dependents, although probably only TASK_IO_ACCOUNTING is needed. Confusingly, the help text claims these options are experimental, even though they don’t depend on EXPERIMENTAL.
Paul Collins
June 28, 2008 at 8:36 pm
missing info that would be very useful: disk seeks
Marko Macek
June 29, 2008 at 8:50 pm
@Rudd-O
atop?? gotta give it a try for sure
@Donnie
thanks for the little utility
I am really worried by the linuxdcpp client’s disk usage
any comments on torrent / DC++ clients and disk usage by them??
I think those small chunks really eat your disk
~S
S
July 1, 2008 at 2:32 pm
This post isn’t really about disk usage or layout, just activity, so I don’t really have any comments on that. I don’t really use BitTorrent for anything.
Donnie Berkholz
July 1, 2008 at 3:04 pm
I believe blktrace is good for figuring out what’s actually happening on the block device, although I have not used it myself.
Paul Collins
July 2, 2008 at 1:23 am
Completely Off Topic, but couldn’t resist to ask.
Did you get those fonts on a terminal running on Linux or on Mac?
How did you get those on a Linux Box?
Pradeep Singh
July 7, 2008 at 1:09 am
You have to buy them, and they’re expensive. TheSans Mono Condensed
Donnie Berkholz
July 7, 2008 at 1:14 am
Hi Donnie,
Amazing tool. I actually never felt the need for something like this, but now that it exists I can think of at least a handful of cases where it could be useful directly or indirectly. I imagine that the same infrastructure could be used for performance regression tests for example.
Thanks!!!
Sidnei da Silva
November 10, 2008 at 10:58 am
Sidnei, thanks for the reminder that I have a blog, and I should write stuff on it. =)
Donnie Berkholz
November 10, 2008 at 11:01 am
Nice info dude, after reading it, if run emerge iotop. this tool is The tool I wished exists , thx
ammar wk
November 23, 2008 at 11:38 pm