Measuring Disk IO programmatically
Solution 1:
iostat reads from /proc/diskstats
- I can't tell you which column corresponds to what though. That would take a bit of investigation.
Additionally, if you'd like to get more info about a specific process, /proc/[processID]
contains information pertaining to the process, such as io and mem
A line in the file looks like:
8 0 sda 1576985 366566 29817737 8671588 4847477 21489330 210704848 14116392 0 14120880 22772188
From /usr/src/linux-*/Documentation/iostats.txt
:
Field 1 -- # of reads completed
This is the total number of reads completed successfully.
Field 2 -- # of reads merged, field 6 -- # of writes merged
Reads and writes which are adjacent to each other may be merged for
efficiency. Thus two 4K reads may become one 8K read before it is
ultimately handed to the disk, and so it will be counted (and queued)
as only one I/O. This field lets you know how often this was done.
Field 3 -- # of sectors read
This is the total number of sectors read successfully.
Field 4 -- # of milliseconds spent reading
This is the total number of milliseconds spent by all reads (as
measured from __make_request() to end_that_request_last()).
Field 5 -- # of writes completed
This is the total number of writes completed successfully.
Field 6 -- # of writes merged
See the description of field 2.
Field 7 -- # of sectors written
This is the total number of sectors written successfully.
Field 8 -- # of milliseconds spent writing
This is the total number of milliseconds spent by all writes (as
measured from __make_request() to end_that_request_last()).
Field 9 -- # of I/Os currently in progress
The only field that should go to zero. Incremented as requests are
given to appropriate struct request_queue and decremented as they finish.
Field 10 -- # of milliseconds spent doing I/Os
This field increases so long as field 9 is nonzero.
Field 11 -- weighted # of milliseconds spent doing I/Os
This field is incremented at each I/O start, I/O completion, I/O
merge, or read of these stats by the number of I/Os in progress
(field 9) times the number of milliseconds spent doing I/O since the
last update of this field. This can provide an easy measure of both
I/O completion time and the backlog that may be accumulating.