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

Stop watching your system crawl because of I/O wait

🧩 The Challenge

You know that feeling when the server load is through the roof but your CPU usage looks perfectly fine? I spent an entire morning thinking a runaway database process was the culprit before realizing the disks were just gasping for air.

💡 The Fix

Use iostat to see if your disks are actually saturated and if processes are getting stuck waiting for them to catch up. It cuts through the confusion when you’re trying to figure out why the system feels like it’s dragging.

iostat -xz 1

⚙️ Why It Works

Adding the -x flag gives you extended stats, and the -z flag hides devices that have zero activity, which saves you from scrolling through an endless list of idle mount points. That final 1 tells it to refresh every second so you can spot the spikes in real-time.

🚀 Pro-Tip: If you see the %util column hitting 100 consistently, stop blaming your code and start looking at your storage performance.

Linux Tips & Tricks | © ngelinux.com | 8/25/2026