flyinweb's blog

Newer Linux kernels have per-process I/O accounting and you can use the iotop tool to find out what’s performing I/O, but in many cases I’m trying to find the source of an I/O problem in an older kernel. I found sort of a hack-ish way to do that today, while trying to figure out why a system was basically unresponsive.

I found a post on Stack Overflow that showed a way you can get per process I/O statistics from the kernel even in older kernels. I adapted this to my needs, and wrote a little script.