[clug] high load

[Peter Barker]

On Mon, 23 Oct 2006, Alex Satrapa wrote:

>> I expect it is disk IO so how do I check it and how do I work out what 
>> process is responsible?
> The only way I'm aware of is to watch the process listings for programs that 
> are in the 'D' state. Also keep an eye on 'vmstat 1' - it might show you

> AFAIK, there is not yet any way in Linux to discern which process is actually 
> causing the high I/O apart from killing random processes and watching for the 
> high I/O to stop.

I do remember reading something quite recently on tracing block device 
access to a process (i.e. the "why is my laptop hard disk spinning up 
/again/?" problem).

Can't find that, but here's a link covering this sort of thing:

http://lwn.net/Articles/155340/

I /think/ I read the more up-to-date article on lwn.net, but I'm not sure.

> Alex

Yours,
-- 
Peter Barker                          |   N    _--_|\ /---- Barham, Vic
Programmer,Sysadmin,Geek              | W + E /     /\
pbarker at barker.dropbear.id.au         |   S   \_,--?_*<-- Canberra
You need a bigger hammer.             |             v    [35S, 149E]
"Peter is apathetic, and I'm vaguely apathetic" -- Rachel, thinking of organising a movie trip