How to Identify Hard Drive Bottlenecks in Linux

hard drivelinuxmonitoringperformanceperformance-monitoring

I'm not asking how to find out where a bottleneck is. I just what to know how to check if the harddrive is being used at its limit (and hence causing a bottleneck).

Something like top where I can see a usage percentage of CPU and RAM.
Is there something like that with which I can monitor harddrive activity?

Native linux tools preferred.

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Take a look at:

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Linux Hard Disk Load – How to Monitor Hard Disk Load on Linux

You can get a pretty good measure of this using the iostat tool.

% iostat -dx /dev/sda 5

Device:         rrqm/s   wrqm/s     r/s     w/s   rsec/s   wsec/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await  svctm  %util
sda               0.78    11.03    1.19    2.82    72.98   111.07    45.80     0.13   32.78   1.60   0.64

The disk utilisation is listed in the last column. This is defined as

Percentage of CPU time during which I/O requests were issued to the device (band-width utilization for the device). Device saturation occurs when this value is close to 100%.

Linux – How to quickly find out if a *nix server is running OK

top is a good tool (if its installed), but the other one I like for a real quick look to see if anything is wrong is dmesg. That should let you know if the server's experiencing something incredibly major (disconnected nics, disk faults, memory faults etc).

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Linux Hard Disk Load – How to Monitor Hard Disk Load on Linux

Linux – How to quickly find out if a *nix server is running OK

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