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On my Lenovo T400 and Ubuntu, the light for hard drive writing keeps flashing. I was wondering if in Linux it is possible to find out what processes are doing I/O to the hard drive? Just like by top, you can find out what processes are using most CPU and memory. Thanks!

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3 Answers

up vote 8 down vote accepted

Iotop fits well with what you want. What I also love about it is that it also allows one to display the accumulated amount of I/O on any of the DISK READ, DISK WRITE, SWAPIN, and IO (overall). This is through a nifty interface:

  • You just press a on the keyboard, and it will sort the hungriest processes on top.
  • Reversing the order, you just press r.
  • If you want to sort by other colums, you just press the left/right key.

Like top, the presentation is rather busy. Another thing is that it doesn't have the myriad options that top has (e.g. I can't chose to hide any of the columns I'm uninterested in), but the tool is more than good enough for its specific purpose.

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Powertop is also useful to find what's using up the battery on a laptop; iotop is still the first place to look for disk accesses. – Gilles Jul 15 '11 at 10:48
up vote 3 down vote

You can use lsof (man lsof). The following will return a list of all files that are open for writing:

lsof | grep -e "[[:digit:]]\+w"
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What files are open, and what files are actually being accessed are two different things. – psusi Jul 15 '11 at 17:27
@psusi An open file for writing is very likely being "accessed." Also, more information can be retrieved by learning lsof via its manpage. – jsumners Jul 15 '11 at 17:41
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Files open for writing may be written to at some point, but not necessarily right now. Many files are kept open but are rarely written to. On the other hand, the files being written to may be opened and closed quickly and so won't show up in lsof. Either way, it is of little help figuring out what process is actually writing to the disk at the moment. – psusi Jul 15 '11 at 18:57
up vote 0 down vote

Use strace.

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That's going to tell you what a particular process is doing, it won't help to find which process is doing something. – Gilles Jul 15 '11 at 10:47

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