How to Determine Which Process Causes IO ?

Sun 22 November 2009 Category: Uncategorized

There is a nifty little program called 'iotop'. Iotop is part of Debian or Ubuntu and can be installed with a simple apt-get.

Once you have determined with 'top' that the system is waiting on IO-access, It is nice to know

which process is responsibe for this IO. Therefore, you want a list of processes, just like top provides, but instead of CPU or RAM usage, it shows the IO a process is generating. This is exactly what 'iotop' provides.

This is ideal when troubleshooting performance problems caused by heavy IO.

http://guichaz.free.fr/iotop/

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