[TriLUG] top-like command for monitoring disk I/O

[James Olin Oden]

On 2/22/07, Alan Porter <porter at trilug.org> wrote:
>
> Yesterday, I noticed that gkrellm was showing a lot of disk activity on
> my system.  I was curious which process was doing all of the
> reads/writes, so I started snooping.  Of course, "top" tells me CPU
> usage.  Plus there's "vmstat", same info, different format.  I tried
> "lsof", but that just tells files that are open, not what's being
> accessed a lot.  When I googled for help, I ended up with a lot of tools
> like "df", "du" and "xdiskusage", which simply tell who's using the most
> space.
>
> (1) What tools do you guys use to monitor disk I/O?  Or filesystem I/O?
>
> (2) And while we're at it, what about tools to monitor network usage?
>
> I've used "netwatch" and "iptraf", both curses-based monitors.  These
> show where the traffic is going, but I'm not sure if they show
> processes.  Of course, marry those with "netstat" and you can find out.
> Just curious if there are top-like programs to monitor network traffic
> (with PID's), too.
>
You may be able to indirectly get at this information through
oprofile.  Its a hardware sampling based profileing tool, that in a
nutshell will be able to show you statistically which processes where
in which libraries and which system calls what percentage of the time.
 So though you couldn't tell exact numbers of bytes read and written
you could see who was doing a lot of reading and writting.

Cheers...james