[ILUG] What process is generating disk I/O

[Justin Mason]

Kenn Humborg writes:
> > > Kenn Humborg wrote:
> > > > Running vmstat 1 on a machine shows me a certain amount of block I/O.
> > > > 
> > > > But, short of strace-ing everything running on the machine, how can
> > > > I determine which processes are generating this I/O?
> > > > 
> > > > lsof will show me open files, but that doesn't help much.
> > > 
> > > echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump
> > > tail -f /var/log/debug
> > 
> > OK - that's a good starting point.  I suppose a better approach
> > might be to fire the kern.debug messages to syslog on another
> > machine so that syslog I/O doesn't cause a feedback loop
> > (process writes to block, kernel writes debug message, syslog
> > writes to /var/log/debug, kernel writes debug message, etc...).	
> 
> Not really as useful as I expected, unfortunately.  It's easy enough
> to see who is reading blocks, but all the writes are attributed to
> kjournald or pdflush.

What about if the fs is mounted with the 'sync' flag?

--j.