process I/O statistics?

kornelix · 07-13-2006, 04:55 AM

There seems to be no way to get per process I/O statistics (counts, bytes) (disk, network) in Linux.

True?

I see only some aggregate statistics in /proc/diskstats.

bulliver · 07-13-2006, 03:27 PM

I am not sure if it contains the info you are looking for but there is a great deal of per process info under /proc/<pid number>/.

gilead · 07-13-2006, 06:32 PM

Do you have the GNU accounting utilities installed? Have a look for the commands ac, sa, lastcomm and accton. If you do have them, you can turn on process accounting by running accton at boot time and logging to /var/log/pacct. For example, to get it running on my setup I did the following (as root):

Code:

touch /var/log/pacct
chown root:root /var/log/pacct
chmod 0644 /var/log/pacct

Then I modified /etc/rc.d/rc.local:

Code:

if [ -x /sbin/accton ]
then 
  /sbin/accton /var/log/pacct 
  echo "Process accounting turned on." 
fi

The utilities allow you to query the stats generated. If you want to look at system based stats there's also the sysstat utilities at http://perso.orange.fr/sebastien.godard/.

kornelix · 07-13-2006, 11:55 PM

Thanks for the help. GNU accounting is not installed on my distro (Ubuntu). I will dig into what is necessary to get them.

Tinkster · 07-14-2006, 02:59 AM

Always bear in mind that gathering stats that fine-grained creates
overhead, and make sure you strike a balance between cost (in terms
of extra load) and gain. I've seen people (specifically Oracle DBAs)
monitor machines to a near stand-still ;} And no, the Gnu process
accounting isn't quite that bad.

Cheers,
Tink

kornelix · 07-14-2006, 04:34 PM

I was looking for something like the perfmon utility in Windows or the old DEC VAX monitor command. These allowed you to tell what processes were causing what loads on the system (CPU, memory, paging, disk IO) in real-time and almost effortlessly. The overheads were trivial.

I see nothing like this in Linux land.

gilead · 07-14-2006, 04:39 PM

Ah - you're running a GUI on your server then? To each his own - if you're using KDE have a look at KSysGuard, it sounds like what you're talking about.

kornelix · 07-15-2006, 12:30 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by gilead

Ah - you're running a GUI on your server then? To each his own - if you're using KDE have a look at KSysGuard, it sounds like what you're talking about.

One app running a GUI on a server - GUILTY !
I deserve nothing less than death!

I will have a look at KSysGuard.