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Can't find something similar to windows resource monitor software (input output monitor). I need tool which draws disk load graphic and processes which uses disk input or output. There are a lot of console alternatives (iotop), but they are not comfortable to use (i can't quickly kill process, copy name of process, look at the graph, they need root access etc.). Is there are gui alternative to this? (on screenshot)

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  • 1
    Check out part B of this article. I don't use anything personally to monitor disk IO, so I can't suggest one, but there seem to be a few options there.
    – Mitch
    Jul 29, 2014 at 13:54
  • try with the package wmdiskmon
    – user308564
    Jul 29, 2014 at 16:37

1 Answer 1

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The htop program doesn't require root access to see disk usage of your own processes and with a little configuration it lets you sort by read/write IO, and it's a great tool for interactively killing processes.

It's also terminal based, which has the advantage of working over SSH.

Go to F2 (Setup) and then select IO_READ_RATE and IO_WRITE_RATE.

Screenshot of htop steup with IO_READ_RATE and IO_WRITE_RATE selected.

After you're finished selecting columns, go to F10 (Done) and you will see the new columns, including IO_READ_RATE abbreviated as IORR and IO_WRITE_RATE abbreviated as IOWR.

You can sort by the relevant column with F6 (SortBy). This shows sorting by IORR. You can see that du and ioping are using the most.

Screenshot of htop default screen showing sorting by IO_READ_RATE

Note that for security reasons -- CVE-2011-2494 -- you cannot see disk usage by programs running as other users unless you run htop as root. (How many bytes a process uses could expose e.g. lengths of ssh usernames and passwords.)

Related questions:

https://superuser.com/questions/50091/how-do-i-find-out-what-processes-are-accessing-the-hard-disk-in-a-gnu-linux-base

https://serverfault.com/questions/169676/howto-check-disk-i-o-utilisation-per-process

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14021810/finding-process-with-heavy-disk-i-o

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  • The relevant sort is by rate, not accumulated accesses. However, htop shows only 0 for the columns IORR, IOWR and IO even when the disk access light is on all the time. Nov 14, 2015 at 14:50
  • Good point, I will change my answer. Nov 21, 2015 at 4:16

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