[gentoo-user] "top" for disk access

[gentoo-user] "top" for disk access

[Iain Buchanan]

Hi all,

is there a top-like utility that can tell me what processes are doing
the most disk reads/writes?

Sometimes my disk will go crazy, and my system slow down.  I usually
know its updatedb, or something similar, but sometimes I have no idea
why.

Any ideas?

thanks,
-- 
Iain Buchanan <iaindb@netspace.net.au>

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Re: [gentoo-user] "top" for disk access

[Bryan Whitehead]

run 'vmstat 1'

On Fri, 28 Oct 2005, Iain Buchanan wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> is there a top-like utility that can tell me what processes are doing
> the most disk reads/writes?
>
> Sometimes my disk will go crazy, and my system slow down.  I usually
> know its updatedb, or something similar, but sometimes I have no idea
> why.
>
> Any ideas?
>
> thanks,
>

-- 
Bryan Whitehead
Email:driver@megahappy.net
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Re: [gentoo-user] "top" for disk access

[Iain Buchanan]

Hi,

thanks for your reply,

On Fri, 2005-10-28 at 00:05 -0700, Bryan Whitehead wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Oct 2005, Iain Buchanan wrote:
> 
> > Hi all,
> >
> > is there a top-like utility that can tell me what processes are doing
> > the most disk reads/writes?
> 
> run 'vmstat 1'

that doesn't seem to tell me what processes are running, only what the
system totals are.  I wanted to see a top like output, eg
process1   xMb/s
process2   yMb/s
etc

thanks,
-- 
Iain Buchanan <iaindb@netspace.net.au>

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Re: [gentoo-user] "top" for disk access

[Rasmus Andersen]

On Fri, Oct 28, 2005 at 05:16:54PM +0930, Iain Buchanan wrote:
> > > is there a top-like utility that can tell me what processes are doing
> > > the most disk reads/writes?
> > 
> > run 'vmstat 1'
> 
> that doesn't seem to tell me what processes are running, only what the
> system totals are.  I wanted to see a top like output, eg
> process1   xMb/s
> process2   yMb/s
> etc

I dont think you can get that out-of-the-box. I have not played with
accounting stuff (sar etc) so that might be able to do something like
this for you but AFAIK then vanilla kernel wont try to track this. The
reason is that short-lived processes might die before their disk request
gets to the block layer, making accounting impossible. A bit more
farfetched you might picture PID wrap and get disk access accounted to
the wrong process. I am not an expert on this so I am happily corrected.

For disk IO I find iostat to be better than vmstat. Its part of the
sysstat package.

Cheers,
  Rasmus
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[gentoo-user] Re: "top" for disk access

[James]

Iain Buchanan <iaindb <at> netspace.net.au> writes:

> is there a top-like utility that can tell me what processes are doing
> the most disk reads/writes?


bonnie and bonnie++ might help

eix bonnie


> Sometimes my disk will go crazy, and my system slow down.  I usually
> know its updatedb, or something similar, but sometimes I have no idea
> why.


Lots of possibilities on these sort of questions. There is a fantastic
network monitoring tool that monitors all sorts of system performance
issues, call 'jffnms'. It's in portage, but, masked at the moment. It's
a bit daunting to get happy, but well worth the effort.  I'm waiting
for it to stablize on gentoo. It was very difficult to get happy under
debian, the last time I hacked at it for a client.


http://dev.gentoo.org/~angusyoung/docs/jffnms/docs/jffnms.html

hth,
James

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