Getting disk i/o statistics for single process in Linux

Question

I need to monitor the I/O statistics of a process that writes to disk. The purpose is to avoid write rates too high for long periods.

I know there's iostat tool to accomplish this task on a system-wide perspective.

Is there something similar to monitor single process disk usage?

Solution

What you want is iotop. Most distributions have a package for it, usually called (logically enough) iotop.

One very cool command (at least, on a system that isn't very busy) is iotop -bo. This will show I/O as it occurs. It also has options to only monitor specific processes or processes owned by specified users.

Comments

[Ciro Santilli Путлер Капут 六四事]

serverfault.com/questions/169676/…

[Matteo Ceccarello]

thank you, exactly what I wanted :) I ca also filter output of iotop -boP with grep to show only stats of the process I want :)

[StatsSorceress]

What if you don't have root access, as iotop requires?