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

Identifying IO-Bound Disk Bottlenecks via lsblk

🧩 The Challenge

You are experiencing system latency but cannot easily map which underlying physical disk or partition is currently handling heavy I/O operations.

💡 The Fix

Use the lsblk utility with extended output columns to visualize the current I/O load and scheduling queue status for all block devices.

lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,TYPE,MOUNTPOINT,SCHED,RQ-SIZE,RA

⚙️ Why It Works

This command exposes the I/O scheduler (SCHED), request queue size (RQ-SIZE), and read-ahead (RA) settings, allowing you to quickly spot hardware or configuration mismatches that induce latency.

🚀 Pro-Tip: Use the -J option to output the block device topology in JSON format if you need to parse the structure in a custom monitoring script.

Linux Tips & Tricks | © ngelinux.com | 7/7/2026