Finding the process w/ highest I/O ?

[Mark Komarinski]

On 05/15/2008 02:48 PM, Paul Lussier wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> How can I easily/quickly (programmatically?) find the top N processes
> on a Linux system using the most I/O ?
>
> There's an errant process eating up NFS space.  We have over 400 NFS
> clients, any one of which *could* be the culprit.
>
> Since the NFS server is an appliance, there's really no way to query it.
>   
We're in the same boat.  We have the case where a user tries to access 
an NFS-mounted directory that has > 50,000 files and causes every other 
NFS client to grind to a halt.

One person in my group just found iotop, which works with a =>2.6.20 
kernel to tell you what's eating up I/O.

http://guichaz.free.fr/misc/

We haven't deployed it yet since we're still on 2.6.18, but probably 
will soon.

-Mark