Iowait indication

c0m4r · 08-19-2010, 09:26 AM

Hi,

Is this possible to check which process or processess is responsible for high percent of iowait (%wa in top). I mean, I know that iowait measures CPU performance, not I/O but it depends directly on the hdd operations (f.e. copying). In other words I would like to check which process is generating hdd load.

Best regards,
Andrew

quanta · 08-19-2010, 10:47 AM

As my understand, it may be:

Code:

ps -eo pid,user,state,command | awk '$3 ~ /D/ {print $0}'

or: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...4/#post3316917

c0m4r · 08-19-2010, 07:51 PM

This is exactly what I looked for and really good lecture to read. Thank you very much quanta.

syg00 · 08-19-2010, 08:33 PM

So long as you only use it as an indication. As you said, this is really looking at things the wrong way around.
It is easy to construct situations where several tasks are "waiting" for I/O, but only one is contributing almost all the load. That can only really be checked by something like blktrace which is at the VFS layer.

Something else you might be interested in is iotop - very nice python script. Seems to be in most distros these days.

c0m4r · 08-20-2010, 10:24 AM

Yes. I know that what "ps" will show me with state "D" is not really what I am looking for, but it is already much more information than iowait alone gives me. Iotop seems to be exactly what I need, I'll check it. Thanks syg00.