Best way to measure disk bandwidth usage

[Doug Clements]

On 11/7/07, Andrea Venturoli <ml at netfence.it> wrote:
>
> Hello.
> I've got a couple of servers which I'd like to keep an eye on in order
> to check wether their storage subsection is providing enough throughput
> or wether disk i/o is their bottleneck.
>
> I know how to check this wrt cpu usage, memory size, network throughput,
> but I'm totally lost when it comes to disk i/o.
> I can run top and press 'm': this will allow me to know which processes
> are using disk the most, but not wether I'm exploiting the hardware to
> the limit or just to a small fraction of what it can do.



gstat, iostat, and systat -vm are the tools I use for this.

--Doug