Watching Hard Drive Activity With iotop On Ubuntu 8.10 And Debian Lenny

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme

This article shows how you can watch your hard drive activity with iotop on Ubuntu 8.10 and Debian Lenny. iotop 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 or threads on the system. iotop displays columns for the I/O bandwidth read and written by each process/thread during the sampling period. It also displays the percentage of time the thread/process spent while swapping in and while waiting on I/O. In addition the total I/O bandwidth read and written during the sampling period is displayed at the top of the interface.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

 

1 Installing iotop

Both Ubuntu 8.10 and Debian Lenny have iotop packages in their repositories, therefore the installation is very easy:

Ubuntu 8.10:

sudo apt-get install iotop

Debian Lenny:

apt-get install iotop

 

2 Usage

Usage is similar to the top program, you just type

iotop

and you will get a table of hard drive activity, updated every second:

Total DISK READ: 0 B/s | Total DISK WRITE: 706.11 K/s
  PID USER      DISK READ  DISK WRITE   SWAPIN    IO>    COMMAND
 4288 root           0 B/s  706.11 K/s  0.00 %  0.00 % sftp-server
    1 root           0 B/s       0 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 % init
    2 root           0 B/s       0 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 % [kthreadd]
    3 root           0 B/s       0 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 % [migration/0]
    4 root           0 B/s       0 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 % [ksoftirqd/0]
    5 root           0 B/s       0 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 % [watchdog/0]
    6 root           0 B/s       0 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 % [events/0]
    7 root           0 B/s       0 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 % [khelper]
 3597 syslog         0 B/s       0 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 % syslogd -u syslog
 3758 mysql          0 B/s       0 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 % mysqld --basedir=/usr --d
 3909 root           0 B/s       0 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 % sshd: root@pts/0
  152 root           0 B/s       0 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 % [pdflush]
  153 root           0 B/s       0 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 % [pdflush]
  154 root           0 B/s       0 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 % [kswapd0]
 3760 mysql          0 B/s       0 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 % mysqld --basedir=/usr --d
 1309 root           0 B/s       0 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 % [mpt_poll_0]
 3635 messageb       0 B/s       0 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 % dbus-daemon --system
 3615 root           0 B/s       0 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 % dd bs 1 if /proc/kmsg of
 3617 klog           0 B/s       0 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 % klogd -P /var/run/klogd/k
 3901 root           0 B/s       0 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 % getty 38400 tty1
 3548 root           0 B/s       0 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 % getty 38400 tty4
 3754 mysql          0 B/s       0 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 % mysqld --basedir=/usr --d

Type q to leave iotop.

To learn more about iotop and additional options, take a look at its man page:

man iotop

 

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