Process & Resource Monitoring (Top/Htop/Ps/Systemd)

Stop guessing which process is chewing through your IO

🧩 The Challenge

Everything on the box feels like it is moving through molasses, but top is showing a load average of barely one. You know the disk is the bottleneck, but half the time you can’t figure out which specific process is thrashing the drive.

💡 The Fix

Use iotop to see exactly what each process is doing in real time, so you can stop playing a guessing game with disk latency. It saves you from having to dig through massive iostat reports just to find the culprit.

sudo iotop -o -a

⚙️ Why It Works

Adding the -o flag filters the output to show only processes that are currently performing actual I/O, while -a accumulates the total transferred amount since the tool started. It cuts out the noise of idle threads so you can see who is actually eating your bandwidth.

🚀 Pro-Tip: If you need to log this to a file for later, pipe the output into a text file and grep for the PIDs that keep popping up.

Linux Tips & Tricks | © ngelinux.com | 10/9/2026