Back to the article

iostat and pidstat — which disk is busy and which process loads it

cheat sheet · sysstat 12.6 · Ubuntu 24.04 https://lab.dimsanych.ru/en/wiki/pidstat-iostat/

Cheat sheet

iostat -dxsy 1 5 disks: tps, kB/s, await, aqu-sz, %util
iostat -x vda 1 3 all fields of one disk
sudo pidstat -dl 1 5 who reads and writes, full command
pidstat -u 1 5 CPU per process, %wait
pidstat -r 1 5 memory and page faults per process
pidstat -d -p 1151 1 5 one process
ionice -p 1151 the process's disk priority class
sudo ionice -c3 -p 1151 let others use the disk first (idle)

Options

The main options of both commands are in the table below, in the groups iostat and pidstat. The full list is in man iostat and man pidstat.