How to use iotop command

Posted on January 11, 2024 by darshin

What is iotop command:

The iotop command is a tool used in Unix and Linux operating systems to monitor and display the disk I/O usage by processes and threads on the system. It stands for "input/output top" and provides a real-time view of the processes that are performing I/O operations, such as reading from or writing to the disk.

Installation

CentOS/RHEL

sudo yum install iotop

Ubuntu

sudo apt install iotop

1. To get the list of processes and their current disk IO usage.

sudo iotop

This command will now display the list of processes and their current disk usage and will keep on updating the same.

2. To show processes that are actually doing IO

sudo iotop -o

This will display all the processes which are currently and actually doing IO.

3. To get the version of the iotop

sudo iotop --version

This will display the currently installed version of iotop tool.

4. To display help section

sudo iotop -h

This command will display the help section of the iotop tool.

5. To display output in non interactive mode

sudo iotop -b

This will display the output in non-interactive and batch mode.

6. To change the number of iterations or updations

sudo iotop -n 3

This command will not update the output 3 times in spite of the default time which is infinity.

7. To display a specific process

sudo iotop -p 14353

This will display the IO usage of the process with the mentioned PID in spite of all the processes

8. To show accumulated output

sudo iotop -a

This will not display the accumulated IO instead of bandwidth.

9. To add a time stamp to each line

sudo iotop -t

This will add a time stamp to each line of the output.

10. To suppress some lines of header

sudo iotop -q

This will now suppress some line of header in the output.