Disk & Filesystem Management (Du/Df/Lsblk/Fstrim)

Find exactly which process is locking up your disk IO

🧩 The Challenge

You’re staring at a server that feels like it’s dragging through molasses, and ‘top’ says your IO wait is through the roof, but you have no clue which process is actually hammering the drives. I’ve spent way too many nights guessing which app was the culprit while the dev team breathed down my neck.

💡 The Fix

Use iotop to get a live, per-process breakdown of disk reads and writes in real-time. It’s like top, but specifically for your block devices, so you can stop the finger-pointing immediately.

sudo iotop -oPa

⚙️ Why It Works

By using the -o flag, the tool ignores idle processes and only shows you the ones actually causing the friction. The -a flag adds up the total accumulated IO, which is massive for catching those background scripts that keep waking up to smash the disk.

🚀 Pro-Tip: Run it with -b if you need to pipe the output to a log file for later review.

Linux Tips & Tricks | © ngelinux.com | 11/2/2026