11

My laptop (no VM, just plain Ubuntu with encrypted home) freezes for 3 minutes a few times per day. During these 3 minutes, the disk LED indicates intense disk activity, and I can't even move the mouse or press CTRL-ALT-F1.

I want to use iotop to find out which process is causing this.
The problem with iotop is that it shows disk usage for all processes (huge table).
How do I limit iotop's output to only the first row?

The idea is to make iotop more efficient so that it manages to compute and write to the log file even when the system is super-slow, so letting iotop display the whole table and then grepping is not a solution.

Improve this question
3
  • Is your hard disk an SSD disk?
    – Nils
    Oct 11, 2011 at 20:51
  • No, normal disk.
    – Nicolas Raoul
    Oct 12, 2011 at 3:41
  • So this is not the SSD-write-back problem. I had a similar problem on a CentOS workstation with an AMD-multi-core CPU. I pinned it down to the cpuspeed-kernel-module. Does the problem vanish if you disable the power-saving-features of the CPU?
    – Nils
    Oct 12, 2011 at 19:52

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
12

Use -a to accumulate usage and -o to only show processes that did IO:

iotop -ao
Improve this answer
5

Not exactly what I was looking for but close: iotop -o

So I will use:

sudo nice -20 sudo iotop -tbod10 > ~/iotop.log
Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .