GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 320358
Disk activity column in System Monitor window
Last modified: 2011-11-11 10:03:55 UTC
It is usually good to know what process is active when your disk or CPU starts maxing out, but you can currently only sort by CPU usage, not disk usage (or both disk usage and CPU usage). It is very useful that the system monitor applet now displays disk activity. I think it would be very useful to add this as a column in the system monitor window, so that the process list can be sorted by disk activity. It would also be great to have a column called "Activity" that was Max(CPU,Disk Usage). Sorting by this column would tell you what processes were placing greatest load on the system (whether IO or CPU bound). (It would also be good to have a column allowing you to see the processes with top network usage, but I imagine that is more difficult.)
i don't think such kind of information exists
Ties from network usage back to the process generating the network traffic don't exist AFAIK. However hard disk reads and writes are available right now in the 2.12.1 panel applet. They're just not shown in the system monitor application. Also, disk reads and writes is a binary 1/0 thing I think, it doesn't give latency, bandwidth, or blocking state. But it is a start.
i know this is my code. I meant per process.
For IO monitoring, is it just possible to measure what percentage of time processes spend blocking on IO? Is it possible to separate out blocking on disk from blocking on kbd/mouse/network/etc.? By the way, I love the new feature that shows disk reads/writes in the applet, thank you if you were the one that implemented that.
it seems that since 2.6.20 (AFAICT), per-process disk usage statistics are now available. cat /proc/<process_id>/io tools which can be used to monitor these stats include atop and sysstat. it would be great to see these statistics added to system-monitor.
It's available, but still optional, and not widely configured. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 499725 ***