Monitor hard disk activity

For checking I/O usage I usually use iotop. It's not installed by default on the distro, but you can easily get it with:

sudo apt-get install iotop

Then launch it with root priviledges:

sudo iotop --only

The --only option will show only the processes currently accessing the I/O.

image of iotop in a terminal


You can try nmon

sudo apt-get install nmon

Try:

nmon

Output Like below:

enter image description here

Press d = Disk Press c = CPU Press r = RAM Press q to exit

You can also give try with:

iostat

Output like below:

Linux 3.16.0-30-generic (client01)    03/01/2016      _i686_  (2 CPU)

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
      39.73   24.58    2.96    0.26    0.00   32.48

Device:            tps    kB_read/s    kB_wrtn/s    kB_read    kB_wrtn
sda               3.32        57.31        40.05  119879872   83767716
sdb               1.45        15.02        22.60   31424408   47273012

Something like htop for the CPU.

atop - AT Computing's System & Process Monitor

# apt-get install -y atop
# atop

It has a similar interface to htop.

Now press shift+d - for disk activity

Then press c - for full command name..

  PID  DSK COMMAND-LINE          
28497  37% /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
28496  36% /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
30528  11% mplayer
..........
.....
  • shift+c - CPU
  • shift+m - Memory
  • shift+d - Disk
  • shift+n - Network (However, it may require a kernel patch)