fiostats File I/O statistics by process for Linux
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process statistics I/O I/O statistics file I/O

fiostats Description

File I/O statistics by process for Linux fiostats is a software that offers file I/O statistics by process for Linux.Developer commentsThis project was started to address a need for a product I worked on wherein a critical, time sensitive process was blocking for long periods of times due to file I/O. The 2.4 kernel (and early 2.6 kernels as I have since learned) do nottrack file I/O by process, so there is no direct means of knowing which processwas putting the load on the I/O subsystem at any point in time. I/O requests can affect system performance, and as a result one process canimpact another. For example a process that dumps a gigabyte to disk in a shortinterval can keep syslogd from tending to its queue which in turn can causeprocesses to block while waiting to send a message via syslog. Alternatively,a process pushing gigabytes off a server causes a burst of reads which can makea heavy file writer block longer than expected, irrespective of schedulingpriorities of the processes.Objective:The objective of this code is to track file I/O to local disks by process. This code focuses on local file I/O (as opposed to network based filesystems like NFS) because of its ability to affect the system as a whole.The following constraints guided the design of this code:- implemented via a loadable module only (cannot patch kernel);- account for file I/O to local disk only;- do not include I/O to sockets, pipes, /proc and other virtual filesystems;- handle dynamic (short lived) processes and persistent processes with the ability to retrieve statistics on demand.- collect file statistics for multithreaded process by thread group.The venerable sysstat package was a guiding influence as well. The target audience for this software is users of linux distributions that do not include file only IO accounting and who do not have the luxury of modifying the kernel proper.

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