Linux I/O Monitoring and Analyze

From WikiMLT

There is a cou­ple of tools avail­able that al­lows you to mon­i­tor and an­a­lyze the disk I/O per­for­mance of your Lin­ux dri­ven sys­tem. Here are list­ed few of them and al­so how to in­stall and ex­am­ples of their ba­sic us­age.

Htop 3.2+

If the lat­est ver­sion of htop is avail­able at your dis­tri­b­u­tion, there is avail­able an ad­di­tion­al tab that shows the I/O met­rics of the in­stance – Screen 1. Here is how to check the avail­able ver­sion and in­stall htop.

sudo apt show htop 2>/dev/null | grep '^Version'
sudo apt install htop

In­stall the lat­est ver­sion of htop 3.2.1–1 on Ubun­tu Serv­er 22.04.1 from a .deb pack­age.

cd /tmp
wget --no-check-certificate https://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/h/htop/htop_3.2.1-1_amd64.deb
sudo apt install ./htop_3.2.1-1_amd64.deb

To be able to see all da­ta in most cas­es you need to run the tool as root:

sudo htop
Screen 1. The new I/O Met­rics tab of htop (v 3.2+). Use Tab to switch to the I/O tab, then use F6 to open the Sort by menu, and sort by IO_WRITE_RATE. The screen­shot is tak­en on Kali Lin­ux 2022. Screen 1. The new I/O Metrics tab of htop (v 3.2+). Use Tab to switch to the I/O tab, then use F6 to open the Sort by menu, and sort by IO_WRITE_RATE. The screenshot is taken on Kali Linux 2022.

Mon­i­tor the Files Changes Re­cur­sive­ly

By the fol­low­ing com­mand we can mon­i­tor which are the most writ­ten files for the past 10 min­utes, larg­er than 800 Kb. This is done re­cur­sive­ly for the di­rec­to­ries /​​​var/​​​lib, /​​​var/​​​log, /​​​var/​​​spool, /​​​var/​​​snap.

sudo watch -n 3 -d \
"find /var/lib /var/log /var/spool /var/snap -type f -size +800k -mmin -10 -printf '%s  \t%t %p\n' | grep -Pv '\.(gz|[0-9])$'"
Screen 2. Use watch and find to monitor file change in real time.
Screen 2. Use watch and find to mon­i­tor file change in re­al time. Screen 2. Use watch and find to monitor file change in real time.

Ref­er­ences