[ILUG] What process is generating disk I/O

[Kenn Humborg]

> On Wed, Feb 14, 2007 at 12:26:19PM -0000, 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.
> > 
> 
> To get a better grip of what your processes are doing over time, it
> may be useful to use a combination of sar and top. sar is a part of 
> the sysstat package (which also includes iostat which you might like).
> You can use sar to collect per-process statistics by using the -x 
> option as follows:
> 
>     sar -x ALL 1 1000 > sar-stats.txt
> 
> This will collect stats each second for 1000 seconds. The output is
> ordered by PID which is useful since you can just check the bottom
> of each list to see what new processes are doing. Unfortunatly the
> output doesn't give process names, but that's okay because top does.

Thanks.  I'll give this a shot next time.

Later,
Kenn