Alternative to iotop for non-root user without sudo privileges

iomonitoringnot-root-userprocess

I'm looking for an alternative to iotop. Here's my situation:

  1. I want to find out if a program is accessing the hard drive a lot while running.
  2. iotop requires root/sudo privileges.
  3. My account is on someone else's system so I'm not allowed to have root or sudo privileges.

Is there an alternative to iotop I could use?

Best Answer

To reference a few more tools.

htop

Command line tool, packaged in most distributions, is able to show the I/O without root privileges but only for your processes.

  • run htop(1), you'll find an interface similar to top(1)
  • hit F2 to enter the configuration
  • use ↓ to select "Columns"
  • use → to select "Available Columns"
  • use ↓ / ↑ to select the I/O informations you want (ie: IO_READ_RATE, IO_WRITE_RATE, IO_RATE) and F5 to add them to the "Active Columns"
  • save with F10
  • use < / > to select the I/O column to affect the sort order

glances

Command line tool with a web mode, not widely packaged but easy to install (ie: pip install glances).

netdata

Web interface, can be run without root privileges, not yet packaged (require compilation).

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