[Gllug] top-like command for disk io ?

[Christian Smith]

salsaman uttered:

> Hi,
> is there a shell command like "top" which shows which processes are using 
> most disk io (instead of CPU percentage) ?


Beyond iostat or vmstat, no.

Such a tool would be difficult to write, as most disk IO os done 
asynchronously. A process may do 100 writes, but result in a single disk 
IO. Another process may do 2 writes, but result in 2 seperate disk IOs, 
and thus tie up the disk more.

What are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to find IO bound processes? 
Trying to maximize IO throughput (I assume for video editing/writing)?

If you want to maximize write throughput, you can try the ext3 journal for 
data writes using "data=journal" mount option. This allows writes to be 
written to the journal in big batches (fast) reducing the latency of 
synchronous writes, if any. This would ultimately increase disk traffic, 
however, but may help in burst periods.


>
> Gabriel.
>
>

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