Determine which process is taking most of disk bandwidth

diskiomonitoring

When the HDD indicator is blinking (for a long period), how could I know which process is taking most disk bandwidth?

Best Answer

Using iotop.

Iotop is a Python program with a top like UI used to show of behalf of which process is the I/O going on. It requires Python ≥ 2.5 (or Python ≥ 2.4 with the ctypes module) and a Linux kernel ≥ 2.6.20 with the TASK_DELAY_ACCT CONFIG_TASKSTATS, TASK_IO_ACCOUNTING and CONFIG_VM_EVENT_COUNTERS options on.

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Related Solutions

Make iotop show only the most disk-intensive item

Use -a to accumulate usage and -o to only show processes that did IO:

iotop -ao

How to find which process is currently writing to the disk

Your best bet is probably iotop:

   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.   At   least   the   CON‐
   FIG_TASK_DELAY_ACCT,  CONFIG_TASK_IO_ACCOUNTING,  CONFIG_TASKSTATS  and
   CONFIG_VM_EVENT_COUNTERS  options need to be enabled in your Linux ker‐
   nel build configuration.

Assuming your process is doing a lot of I/O operations, it should show up pretty high in that list.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Make iotop show only the most disk-intensive item

How to find which process is currently writing to the disk

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