Monitoring using iotop

iotop is installed via sudo apt install iotop and is a great tool for monitoring I/O in your box.

 

Here are a few tips using iotop

Normally processes show only for a second or 2 and if you are not quick with your eyes you will miss it. This command shows aggregated values, so they figures stay on the screen.

sudo iotop -a

This next command does the same, but only processes actually doing I/O (shorter list)

sudo iotop -ao

Finally we have a command that you can run i the background which will save the info to a logfile in your home directory.

sudo nice -20 sudo iotop -tbod10 > ~/iotop.log