an htop-like tool to display disk activity in linux

Question

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?

Note that you can also do this in `htop`. `Setup >> Select Columns` and choose your combination of `RBYTES`, `WBYTES`, `IO_READ_RATE`, `IO_WRITE_RATE`, and `IO_RATE`. Original answer here http://serverfault.com/a/25034 — joelostblom, Feb 19 '16 at 14:40

score 185 · Accepted Answer · edited Feb 06 '15 at 10:37

185

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

iotop

edited Feb 06 '15 at 10:37

Anwar

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answered Jan 22 '09 at 13:51

Egil

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+1 Love being able to see the process that is killing my I/O. – eduncan911 Oct 21 '14 at 15:32
A python version of this is here, but requires root: http://guichaz.free.fr/iotop/ – Hayden Thring Apr 09 '16 at 23:05
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Use `yum install iotop` for Centos – Zsolti Jun 07 '16 at 09:01
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@HaydenThring `iotop` also needs needs to be used as root because... it's the same package. Exactly the same ouput on the program and the `--version` flag as well. Did worked perfectly. – m3nda Jun 15 '16 at 19:27

score 69 · Answer 2 · answered May 15 '09 at 01:17

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                         |                                                      ?
??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

I tried this, and while the refresh was slow, the graphing of MB/s is too small when dealing with SSD drives (it goes to a scale of 0, 25, 50, 75, and 100 TB/s). I ended up using iotop as its default refresh is fast and actually shows the process killing the I/O. Still a +1 for an option though. — eduncan911, Oct 21 '14 at 15:31

score 15 · Answer 3 · edited Mar 29 '13 at 19:59

15

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.

edited Mar 29 '13 at 19:59

akostadinov

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answered Jan 22 '09 at 13:48

jpalecek

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this one is shipped with fedora 18 and is working fine for me. Perhaps these patches are already upstream. There is a netatop optional module for per process network activity if one wants that. – akostadinov Mar 29 '13 at 19:36

score 5 · Answer 4 · edited Aug 13 '14 at 21:23

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?

an htop-like tool to display disk activity in linux

4 Answers4