Ubuntu: tool for displaying disk activity in general and by process

5

1

My Ubuntu system is occasionally becoming very sluggish. I'm running many things simultaneously and it's very difficult to tell which program is the culprit.

I suspect that the sluggishness is due to disk activity since the CPU usage is consistently under 50% on each of the 4 cores of the CPU, and over 30% of the 6GB of RAM are free.

Is there a tool that can show me in real time the number of disk IO operations per second and the amount of data read/written per second? Can all this info be broken down and displayed per process?

GJ.

Posted 2010-10-12T23:32:11.173

Reputation: 8 151

I'm still hoping some day I'll find a graphical monitor, that shows some kind of graph. Windows 8 Has really impressive system monitoring capabilities in TaskManager. – ThorSummoner – 2015-03-16T06:26:38.037

Answers

6

I can recommend iotop, which shows you exactly disk-read and disk-write in bytes per seconds, per process. You can install it with sudo apt-get install iotop in Ubuntu.

Tronic

Posted 2010-10-12T23:32:11.173

Reputation: 421

By default, all processes are shown, but you can use "iotop --only", or hit "o" during the display, to show only processes or threads actively doing I/O. You can also limit it to processes (rather than including all threads) with the -P command-line option. Hit "a" display accumulated I/O instead of bandwidth. In this mode, iotop shows the amount of I/O processes have done since iotop started. – meshfields – 2013-09-14T06:26:59.027

3

Try atop. Start it and press d to show disk-related output.

cYrus

Posted 2010-10-12T23:32:11.173

Reputation: 18 102

2

You can try Saidar. 

apt-get install saidar

enter image description here


Alternatively you could try one of these: http://www.upubuntu.com/2012/06/list-of-best-system-monitoring.html

meshfields

Posted 2010-10-12T23:32:11.173

Reputation: 196

Asked: 2010-10-12T23:32:11.173

Viewed: 9 114 times

Active: 2013-09-14T06:35:53.170