So it has to come to my attention that iotop isn't availalbe for 2.6.18 since it's less than 2.6.20 and requires Python 2.6+. I've done some research and came across this article: http://lserinol.blogspot.com/2009/09/io-usage-per-process-on-linux.html

According to this, if these process have io stats in /proc/pid#/io (where pid# is the process #) it's doable regardless of the kernel version. So, in reality, I could upgrade Python to 2.6 and test out iotop. However, my flavor of Linux, CentOS release 5.5 (Final), only supports Python 2.4.3-44.el5 currently. If I were to do uninstall from yum, it doesn't look so pretty. It ends up wanting to uninstall 235 packages, most of which are very important!

I read in one place, online (I forget the URL from yesterday), that you can install Python 2.6+ parallel to this one, and have the rpm install for iotop use that. Well, I didn't choose that route.

I figured, what the heck, lets write iotop (not copying it, but reverse engineering it without actually looking at it's code/it in use) in bash. I thought it would just grab the /proc/pid#/io file and parse stats.

So I wrote a script to grab the top 10 rchar, wchar, read_bytes, and write_bytes by collecting all these stats from all the /proc/pid#/io files, sorting them by each metric, then grabbing the top 10 highest values.

The conclusion, the data seems completely useless.

Does anybody know any resources for advanced Linux where I can figure out how to take these /proc/pid#/ directories and figure out what the heck they are doing with io on the disk?

My main goal is to figure out what exactly is causing high load on my disk. I just know it's on the / partition (/dev/sda2 in this case), and I'm not really sure how to narrow it down without the help of iotop. If I run iostat to grab metrics for 1 minute, every second, the first result it gives me shows a high 'kB_read/s', so that makes me think, it's reading mostly. However, if I watch the update it gives me every second, it's actually just showing values for kB_wrtn/s. This makes me think the initial value iostat gives me is misleading.