How to locate the high disk I/O process

UltraSoul · 12-03-2009, 09:06 AM

Hi, All

I have RHEL4 AS4 U4 installed on HP DL380 G5.I always have high disk on my raid1 disk. I wonder how to locate the process which performs high disk I/O. And any ideas to improve the disk writing performance?

paulsm4 · 12-03-2009, 09:16 AM

Hi -

There are actually a bunch of different tools: top, iostat, vmstat, lsof and ps come immediately to mind.

Different distros have different GUI's that are similar in spirit to Windows tools like Process Explorer, Performance Monitor and/or filemon - you can Google for them, or look around your distro's package manager (I confess, I don't know what's available OOTB for RHEL 4).

Finally, you might also want to look at the info in /proc/sys/vm/block_dump.

'Hope that helps .. PSM