If you want a quick view of a Linux system’s process load, you can use top or — slightly nicer — htop. But what if you want a quick snapshot of how the disk system is doing? There are a few tools you can use, some of which are not nearly as common as top.
First, iotop
Most similar to top is iotop. This program shows you the total and current disk read and write numbers for the file system and also shows you who is eating up the most disk I/O. This screen looks busy:
Here’s a tip. If you look at the bottom of the screen there are some key commands. The O key will hide all inactive processes (or show them if they were hidden). That makes the output manageable:
You can get the same effect with the -o command line option. Note the other keyboard commands let you select threads instead of processes, change display options, and set the ionice priority for a process.
There’s iostat
If you are more interested in this kind of data per device instead of per process or thread, try iostat. It shows some process information, too but it is all nicely summarized:
This command just runs one time and gives you a result. If you want to repeat it periodically, you can add a time to wait between reports and an optional count of how many times to execute. If you do that, yo ..
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