There have been a number of folks in the SysAdmin blogosphere posting about iotop, which is a Linux utility for viewing I/O activity in a a top-like display. To see just how useful iotop was, I installed it and ran it with the “-o” option (only report processes that are actively doing I/O):
$ iotop -o
Total DISK READ: 11.85 K/s | Total DISK WRITE: 118.81 M/s
PID USER DISK READ DISK WRITE SWAPIN IO> COMMAND
783 root 7.90 K/s 620.04 K/s 0.00 % 1.37 % [kjournald]
6199 matty 3.95 K/s 118.21 M/s 0.00 % 0.07 % dd if /dev/zero of /tmp/foo
This is cool stuff, and I am stoked that I can now easily view I/O activity on my Linux and Solaris hosts. Niiiice!