Linux – Show each file’s read/write rate in Linux (CentOS)

centoslinux

Is there a command in linux (more specifically on CentOS 5), that shows how many bytes/sec each file is being read in the past few second. A similar tool in Windows 7 is the Resource Monitor, which can show each file's read speed, and it is helpful diagnosing system performance degrade.

Best Answer

My favorite is iotop. It will show I/O counts by process.

Other useful commands to investigate I/O hogs:

  • vmstat: a high count at the wa column is a sign of stressed machines
  • iostat: reports CPU statistics and input/output statistics for devices, partitions and NFS

Start with vmstat; if there are less than 2 processes in I/O wait (wa column), the machine is not I/O starved, and there is a high chance your performance problem is not related to I/O. Look at the swap in/out, high numbers there indicates your system is memory starved.

If your system is indeed I/O starved, iostat can give you a hint of what device, partition or network filesystem is stressed. Sometimes this is enough to guess the culprit.

Sample output for vmstat:

operator@server:~$ sudo vmstat 10 5
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa
 0  0      0 408892 294200 4310552    0    0     0     6    3    2  1  2 97  0
 0  0      0 409372 294200 4310552    0    0     0    54 2192 4880  1  3 97  0
 0  0      0 409124 294200 4310496    0    0     0    18 2200 4895  0  3 96  0
 0  0      0 409000 294200 4310496    0    0     0    26 2182 4884  0  2 97  0
 0  0      0 409620 294200 4310496    0    0     0    18 2195 5120  0  2 97  0

Sample output for iotop:

Total DISK READ: 0.00 B/s | Total DISK WRITE: 0.00 B/s
  TID  PRIO  USER     DISK READ  DISK WRITE  SWAPIN     IO>    COMMAND
27327 be/4 www-data    0.00 B/s    3.67 K/s  0.00 %  0.00 % apache2 -k start
29714 be/4 postgres    0.00 B/s    0.00 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 % postgres: stats collector process
    1 be/4 root        0.00 B/s    0.00 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 % init
    2 be/4 root        0.00 B/s    0.00 B/s  0.00 %  0.00 % [kthreadd]
...
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