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Slartibartfast
Asked: 2011-05-14 21:57:29 +0800 CST

How do you monitor the performance of a character device (e.g. tape drive)?

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There are many ways to monitor block device performance: dstat and iostat, heck, even sar will give you data on block device I/O rates. Unfortunately, I don't know of any good spur-of-the-moment tools for monitoring the performance of a character device like a tape drive.

I know there are tools to monitor performance if you remember in advance to do it (pv, dd + SIGUSR1, probably others), but say you're 2 hours into a job that might be 3 hours or 30 hours depending on the performance, and you don't know which it is.

The only thing I can think of is some elaborate use of strace or similar, parsing the output for bytes written, maybe with timestamps. Is there a commonly used tool that I've forgotten or never heard of?

io tape performance-monitoring tapedrive

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I found a SystemTAP script for SCSI tape devices:

    http://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki/WSiostatSCSI

    I haven't tried it; don't know what kind of shape it's in.

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  2. As I know, HP has a program which can check HP tape device's performance. You can find it on here

    I guess other tape device vendors also have similar tools for monitoring tape device's real time status. You can check their website for this kind of applications. Good luck.

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