shortlist processes which are writing / reading to / from disks

pbhat · 04-02-2010, 04:29 PM

At times I see heavy hard-disk activity slowing down system.I have enough RAM and enough of it free.Apparently I am not doing anything that should cause this.'vmstat' shows high numbers for "bi bo"

I want to find out which processes are doing "bi bo".How can I zero in on the particular processes?What command?

Thanks in advance.

zeom · 04-02-2010, 05:20 PM

iotop comes to mind. But before you can use that you need to enable CONFIG_TASKSTATS, CONFIG_TASK_DELAY_ACCT and CONFIG_TASK_IO_ACCOUNTING in your kernel config and rebuild your kernel. You can check that with

Code:

zgrep TASK /proc/config.gz

HTH
zeom

syg00 · 04-02-2010, 07:04 PM

Later versions of the sysstat package also provide historical data in a properly instrumented kernel. Taskstats has now been around for a while.

pbhat · 04-04-2010, 08:55 AM

Thank you both.That gives me what I am looking for.It is sysstat package which gives very indepth info,iotop appears to be equal to 'pidstat interval'.