[CDBUG-talk] measuring HD activity

[Jesse Kempf]

Jaime wrote:
> 	Anyone know a good way to check for heavy hard drive thrashing?   
> Ideally, I'd like to know which process is doing it, too.
>
> 	I have some servers at work that I think the users (middle and high  
> school students, in this case) might be pushing kind of hard.  They  
> complain about performance issues, but they seem intermittent.  I'm  
> wondering if this will trace back to one or more users trying to  
> really push HD reads and writes without realizing they were doing that.
>
> 	One suspicion is that they're trying to store their video editing  
> projects in their networked home directories.  Another is web caches  
> being hit really bad in some way.
>
> 	Any suggestions?
>   
I'd try systat -vmstat 1. It will at least indicate which of your disks 
is getting hit, and how hard. As for what process? If these disks back a 
network share, I'd just use something like iftop to see who's using the 
most bandwidth.

Cheers,
-Jesse