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I'm looking for a tool which will list open files sorted by amount of activity in the file. So lsof does not do the job (unless I'm overlooking a way to use lsof). Ideally, the tool should work like top, and one should be able to switch between specific activity for sorting: reads, writes, bytes, seeks per second. Preferably, it should be readily available in RHEL/CentOS/EPEL.

Does such a tool exist?

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    You could have a look at filetop from bcc-tools, which is only available with 7.6 RHEL release and clones. I think it does not provide exactly the features you are looking for. This RHEL arcticle might also be interesting.
    – Thomas
    Jun 29, 2019 at 14:15
  • An other tool, which would not answer the question but can still help is iotop: I/O per process. Good enough to immediately put on the top a find command running on a huge tree
    – A.B
    Jun 29, 2019 at 16:29
  • I would like to suggest atop, which is usually readily available in software repositories. It is a top-like tool that can show disk utilization per process/thread, see atoptool.nl. It doesn't show per-file utilization AFAIK though.
    – Edward
    Jun 30, 2019 at 5:23
  • Thomas: bcc-tools' filetop does exactly what I need, thanks. However, in CentOS 7.6, I need to patch it to handle a bug: github.com/iovisor/bcc/issues/2119 It looks like RHEL/CentOS 7.7 will have that fixed.
    – Troels Arvin
    Jul 6, 2019 at 11:00

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Sysdig is probably what you want, it's programmable in case it isn't. The topfiles_bytes "chisel" (sysdig script) lists the most I/O-ed files.

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  • Interesting. However, adding kernel modules is possible in the environment where I would like to use this.
    – Troels Arvin
    Jul 6, 2019 at 10:58
  • Ok, I am pretty sure that such a tool does not exist. Lsof just looks at a snapshot of the open files, there is no readily available metric for file i/o. Kernel extensions are the only way.
    – w00t
    Jul 7, 2019 at 9:38

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