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Amandasaurus
Asked: 2011-01-21 03:57:40 +0800 CST

See what files are being written to (like iotop but for files, not processes)

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I have a Linux server, and it's doing a lot of disk io. There is one process that is doing most of the disk writes. I found this out with iotop, which shows the processes that are doing disk I/O. Is there an equivant programme (in the debian lenny apt repositories) that will show me what files are being written to? a 'top' like interface would be great? Is this even possible?

performance linux debian filesystems

2 Answers

  1. lsof may help if you know the process you want to watch:

    lsof -p <pid> -r 5

    -r is the number of seconds between checks.

    • 16

  2. You can use sysdig:

    sudo apt-get install sysdig;
sysdig -c topfiles_bytes;

    There's also an interactive (top-like) terminal program that might be useful in your case.

    csysdig;
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