How to monitor disk I/O in Linux from command line

Last updated on December 10, 2020 by Dan Nanni

If your Linux system gets slow down due to heavy disk I/O activities, you probably want to know which processes or users (in case of multi-user systems) are the culprit for such activities. You may also wish to monitor disk I/O trending over time as part of daily Linux system administration. Here I will introduce several disk I/O monitoring tools on Linux.

Monitor disk I/O on per-process basis

If you want to monitor disk I/O activities of individual Linux processes, you can try iotop. This tool shows a sorted list of the most I/O intensive processes in real time via top-like interface.

Install iotop on Linux

To install iotop on Ubuntu or Debian, run the following.

$ sudo apt-get install iotop

To install iotop on Fedora, run:

$ sudo yum install iotop

To install iotop on CentOS or RHEL, first set up RepoForge repository on your system, and then use yum command.

$ sudo yum install iotop

Monitor Disk I/O with iotop

To monitor systemwide disk I/O with iotop, simply run the following:

$ sudo iotop

Running iotop without any argument like above shows a list of all existing processes regardless of their disk I/O activities. If you want iotop to only show processes that are actually doing disk I/O, run the following instead.

$ sudo iotop -o

Monitor disk I/O on per-disk basis

If you are interested in monitoring disk read/write rates of individual disks, you can use iostat. This tool allows you to monitor I/O statistics for each device or partition. To use this tool, you need to run sysstat package.

To install sysstat on Ubuntu or Debian:

$ sudo apt-get install sysstat

To install sysstat on CentOS, RHEL or Fedora:

$ sudo yum install sysstat

To monitor disk I/O of individual disk devices:

$ sudo iostat -xd <update interval in seconds>

The above iostat command will report per-device I/O statistics, including # of read/write requests per second (noted as r/s, w/s), average read/write speed (in KB/s), average read/write wait time (in milliseconds), average size of requests (in sectors), and percentage of CPU time spent for I/O requests. The statistics are refreshed every time interval specified.

To monitor disk I/O of individual disk partitions:

$ sudo iostat -pxd <update interval in seconds>

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