Randall A Sindlinger on 8 Jan 2009 09:19:14 -0800


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Re: [PLUG] Monitoring I/O by process


On Wed, Jan 07, 2009 at 04:16:02PM -0500, Matthew Rosewarne wrote:
> 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.


In openSuSE 10.3 (kernel 2.6.22.18-0.2-bigsmp), iotop doesn't appear to be 
installed (locate turns up nothing).

Is this the iotop you're referring to?
  http://freshmeat.net/projects/iotop/

Also, googling for "iotop rpm" turned up a hit for 
  http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=iotop
whose google exerpt says "Linux has always been able to show how much I/O was 
going on (the bi and bo columns of the vmstat 1 command)."  Maybe that's true,
but upon quickly looking at the vmstat command, I wasn't all that impressed 
with it.  But I'll keep it at the bottom of my toolbox :-)

The rpmfind.net page also indicates that iotop is specifically for Fedora?

-Randall
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