an htop-like tool to display disk activity in linux
LinuxCommand LineIoLinux Problem Overview
I am looking for a Linux command-line tool that would report the disk IO activity. Something similar to htop would be really cool. Has someone heard of something like that?
Linux Solutions
Solution 1 - Linux
You could use iotop. It doesn't rely on a kernel patch. It Works with stock Ubuntu kernel
There is a package for it in the Ubuntu repos. You can install it using
sudo apt-get install iotop
Solution 2 - Linux
nmon shows a nice display of disk activity per device. It is available for linux.
? Disk I/O ?????(/proc/diskstats)????????all data is Kbytes per second??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????ij ?DiskName Busy Read WriteKB|0 |25 |50 |75 100| ? ?sda 0% 0.0 127.9|> | ? ?sda1 1% 0.0 127.9|> | ? ?sda2 0% 0.0 0.0|> | ? ?sda5 0% 0.0 0.0|> | ? ?sdb 61% 385.6 9708.7|WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWR> | ? ?sdb1 61% 385.6 9708.7|WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWR> | ? ?sdc 52% 353.6 9686.7|WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWR > | ? ?sdc1 53% 353.6 9686.7|WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWR > | ? ?sdd 56% 359.6 9800.6|WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW> | ? ?sdd1 56% 359.6 9800.6|WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW> | ? ?sde 57% 371.6 9574.9|WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWR> | ? ?sde1 57% 371.6 9574.9|WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWR> | ? ?sdf 53% 371.6 9740.7|WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWR > | ? ?sdf1 53% 371.6 9740.7|WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWR > | ? ?md0 0% 1726.0 2093.6|>disk busy not available | ? ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
Solution 3 - Linux
It is not htop-like, but you could use atop. However, to display disk activity per process, it needs a kernel patch (available from the site). These kernel patches are now obsoleted, only to show per-process network activity an optional module is provided.
Solution 4 - Linux
Use collectl which has extensive process I/O monitoring including monitoring threads.
Be warned that there are I/O counters for I/O being written to cache and I/O going to disk. collectl reports them separately. If you're not careful you can misinterpret the data. See http://collectl.sourceforge.net/Process.html
Of course, it shows a lot more than just process stats because you'd want one tool to provide everything rather than a bunch of different one that displays everything in different formats, right?