JP Vossen on 7 Jan 2009 21:21:00 -0800


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Re: [PLUG] Monitoring I/O by process


 > Date: Wed, 7 Jan 2009 16:16:02 -0500
 > From: Matthew Rosewarne <mrosewarne@inoutbox.com>
> 
> Quite a while ago at the central meeting, someone asked whether it 
> was possible to find out which processes were thrashing a machine's
 > disk. The answer was that it was not possible to actually know which
 > process was using the disk due to the way the kernel manages I/O.
 >
 > However, there apparently has been a way to monitor I/O by process
 > since Linux 2.6.20 (CONFIG_TASKSTATS & CONFIG_TASK_IO_ACCOUNTING).
 > The "iotop" tool uses this information to display how much I/O each
 > process is using. I find it quite useful in finding resource hogs,
 > since I'm more often limited by my disk than my CPU.

That's really good to know.  I've asked myself that question a few 
times, and got all excited the other day when reading the _Absolute 
FreeBSD_ book, since per page 579 FreeBSD top(1) has an I/O mode (that 
at least superficially looks a lot like the output from iotop).  Boy was 
I bummed when I realized that Linux top doesn't have that.

Thanks,
JP
----------------------------|:::======|-------------------------------
JP Vossen, CISSP            |:::======|      http://bashcookbook.com/
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