Alternative to iotop for non-root user without sudo privileges

Question

I'm looking for an alternative to iotop. Here's my situation:

1. I want to find out if a program is accessing the hard drive a lot while running.
2. iotop requires root/sudo privileges.
3. My account is on someone else's system so I'm not allowed to have root or sudo privileges.

Is there an alternative to iotop I could use?

Solution 1

To reference a few more tools.

htop

• http://hisham.hm/htop/
• https://github.com/hishamhm/htop

Command line tool, packaged in most distributions, is able to show the I/O without root privileges but only for your processes.

• run htop(1), you'll find an interface similar to top(1)
• hit F2 to enter the configuration
• use ↓ to select "Columns"
• use → to select "Available Columns"
• use ↓ / ↑ to select the I/O informations you want (ie: IO_READ_RATE, IO_WRITE_RATE, IO_RATE) and F5 to add them to the "Active Columns"
• save with F10
• use < / > to select the I/O column to affect the sort order

---

glances

• https://nicolargo.github.io/glances/
• https://github.com/nicolargo/glances

Command line tool with a web mode, not widely packaged but easy to install (ie: pip install glances).

---

netdata

• https://my-netdata.io/
• https://github.com/firehol/netdata

Web interface, can be run without root privileges, not yet packaged (require compilation).

Solution 2

The only thing that comes close is iostat from the sysstat suite which also works for regular users, or maybe atop -d (fails with a floating pointing exception here).

A very similar question was asked on ServerFault: In absence of iotop, which command is most appropriate for finding I/O-bound processes?

iotop doesn't work for regular users any more due to a security fix in the kernel: see e.g. Red Hat bug report: Netlink error: Operation not permitted

For the same reason, you probably cannot display other processes' I/O stats on that level as regular user.

Comments

[Pankaj Goyal]

You could use a combination of top, specifically watching for 'wait' states, and vmstat.

[ilija139]

I have been using htop for so long and didn't know about this feature. Thanks!

[oHo]

There are also iptraf and iptraf-ng, nice ncurses consol tools. But these projects seem to be abandoned. :(

[bufh]

iptraf* does only monitor network I/O

[Radio Controlled]

When I do as suggested for htop, it only displays "no permission" in the respective columns. Seems like I still need sudo rights for viewing this information.