Ubuntu: tool for displaying disk activity in general and by process

Question

My Ubuntu system is occasionally becoming very sluggish. I'm running many things simultaneously and it's very difficult to tell which program is the culprit.

I suspect that the sluggishness is due to disk activity since the CPU usage is consistently under 50% on each of the 4 cores of the CPU, and over 30% of the 6GB of RAM are free.

Is there a tool that can show me in real time the number of disk IO operations per second and the amount of data read/written per second? Can all this info be broken down and displayed per process?

Solution 1

I can recommend iotop, which shows you exactly disk-read and disk-write in bytes per seconds, per process. You can install it with sudo apt-get install iotop in Ubuntu.

Solution 2

Try atop. Start it and press d to show disk-related output.

Solution 3

You can try Saidar.

apt-get install saidar

Alternatively you could try one of these: http://www.upubuntu.com/2012/06/list-of-best-system-monitoring.html

Comments

[ThorSummoner]

I'm still hoping some day I'll find a graphical monitor, that shows some kind of graph. Windows 8 Has really impressive system monitoring capabilities in TaskManager.

[Admin]

By default, all processes are shown, but you can use "iotop --only", or hit "o" during the display, to show only processes or threads actively doing I/O. You can also limit it to processes (rather than including all threads) with the -P command-line option. Hit "a" display accumulated I/O instead of bandwidth. In this mode, iotop shows the amount of I/O processes have done since iotop started.