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My Ubuntu system is occasionally becoming very sluggish. I'm running many things simultaneously and it's very difficult to tell which program is the culprit.

I suspect that the sluggishness is due to disk activity since the CPU usage is consistently under 50% on each of the 4 cores of the CPU, and over 30% of the 6GB of RAM are free.

Is there a tool that can show me in real time the number of disk IO operations per second and the amount of data read/written per second? Can all this info be broken down and displayed per process?

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3 Answers

Try atop. Start it and press d to show disk-related output.

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I can recommend iotop, which shows you exactly disk-read and disk-write in bytes per seconds, per process. You can install it with sudo apt-get install iotop in Ubuntu.

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By default, all processes are shown, but you can use "iotop --only", or hit "o" during the display, to show only processes or threads actively doing I/O. You can also limit it to processes (rather than including all threads) with the -P command-line option. Hit "a" display accumulated I/O instead of bandwidth. In this mode, iotop shows the amount of I/O processes have done since iotop started. –  Achmed Durangi Sep 14 '13 at 6:26
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You can try Saidar.

apt-get install saidar

enter image description here

Alternatively you could try one of these: http://www.upubuntu.com/2012/06/list-of-best-system-monitoring.html

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