Monitor your Disk Activity Reads/Writes using Iotop

Have you ever been in a situation when your system is freezed/terribly slow aka "what the hell is going on?" moment. This is probably the most frequent annoying thing that happens on computer. Whenever I face something like this I used to run top to catch the culprit but sometimes this is not the result of over occupied processor but because of constant hard disk access which are not visible with top most of the times. Well linuxers, now we have a solution to this problem, Iotop, a python coded brother of top.

In order to catch the culprit in cases of frequent hard disk access, you can use Iotop to see which process is responsible for the most reads/writes. Here is a screenshot of my system downloading a movie on LAN.

Requirements

Don't get scared after looking at the requirements stated by the developers, most of the current systems should support it. It requires Python ≥ 2.5 (or Python ≥ 2.4 with the ctypes module) and a Linux kernel ≥ 2.6.20 with the TASK_DELAY_ACCT and TASK_IO_ACCOUNTING options enabled.

Install iotop on ubuntu

Either click this link(in case of error help) or run the following command in the terminal.

[shredder12]$ sudo apt-get install iotop

Install iotop on Fedora

Run this command in the terminal to install it.

[shredder12]$ su -c 'yum install iotop'