Too Cool for Internet Explorer

Iotop

iotop

One of the drawbacks of top is that it often can’t help to spot processes which push up system load so high.
High system loads are often caused by very I/O intensive tasks.
And as I/O intensive needn’t mean CPU intensive, those tasks may not even show up in top.

This is where Iotop comes into play. It is just a python script which evaluates the per-task disk I/O accounting statistics exported by the Linux kernel (2.6.20+).

Iotop screenshot

This is what you need to enable in your kernel configuration:

General setup
[*] Export task/process statistics through netlink (EXPERIMENTAL)
[ ]   Enable per-task delay accounting (EXPERIMENTAL)
[*]   Enable extended accounting over taskstats (EXPERIMENTAL)
[*]     Enable per-task storage I/O accounting (EXPERIMENTAL)

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