Man page - biotop-bpfcc(8)

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Manual

biotop(8) System Manager's Manual biotop(8)

biotop - Block device (disk) I/O by process top.

biotop [-h] [-C] [-r MAXROWS] [-p PID] [interval] [count]

This is top for disks.

This traces block device I/O (disk I/O), and prints a per-process summary every interval (by default, 1 second). The summary is sorted on the top disk consumers by throughput (Kbytes). The PID and process name shown are measured from when the I/O was first created, which usually identifies the responsible process.

For efficiency, this uses in-kernel eBPF maps to cache process details (PID and comm) by I/O request, as well as a starting timestamp for calculating I/O latency, and the final summary.

This works by tracing various kernel blk_*() functions using dynamic tracing, and will need updating to match any changes to these functions.

Since this uses BPF, only the root user can use this tool.

CONFIG_BPF and bcc.

Don't clear the screen.
Maximum number of rows to print. Default is 20.
Trace this PID only.
Interval between updates, seconds.
Number of interval summaries.

# biotop
# biotop -C
5 second summaries, 10 times only:
# biotop 5 10

The contents of /proc/loadavg
Cached process ID, if present. This usually (but isn't guaranteed) to identify the responsible process for the I/O.
Cached process name, if present. This usually (but isn't guaranteed) to identify the responsible process for the I/O.
Direction: R == read, W == write. This is a simplification.
Major device number.
Minor device number.
Disk device name.
Number of I/O during the interval.
Total Kbytes for these I/O, during the interval.
Average time for the I/O (latency) from the issue to the device, to its completion, in milliseconds.

Since block device I/O usually has a relatively low frequency (< 10,000/s), the overhead for this tool is expected to be low or negligible. For high IOPS storage systems, test and quantify before use.

This is from bcc.

https://github.com/iovisor/bcc

Also look in the bcc distribution for a companion _examples.txt file containing example usage, output, and commentary for this tool.

Linux

Unstable - in development.

Brendan Gregg, Rocky Xing

top(1) by William LeFebvre

biosnoop(8), biolatency(8), iostat(1)

2016-02-06 USER COMMANDS