Unix Disk Activity Tools???

[lloydsj]

Hi,

I've got a HP-UX box that has very continuously high disk usage happening on it. Basically I want to know which are the files that are getting continuously accessed? for read/write. So I can then narrow down on what user/programs are causing it to perform like this.

What commands can I use to see this???

Any pointers about what to use, to see where our bottleneck is appreciated.

Cheers.

 

[Una]

top should show disk activity, or lsof if you want to a more detailed view of whats going on.

 

[lloydsj]

top should show disk activity, or lsof if you want to a more detailed view of whats going on.

'top' shows processes, not actual file names that are being accessed i believe.

'lsof' looks more like what im after, but will it actually show me how often/how much a file is being used?

lsof is not already installed on hpux so i'll need to put it on, but would obviously like to know its what im after before i install it.

cheers.

 

[Una]

'top' shows processes, not actual file names that are being accessed i believe.

'lsof' looks more like what im after, but will it actually show me how often/how much a file is being used?

lsof is not already installed on hpux so i'll need to put it on, but would obviously like to know its what im after before i install it.

cheers.

No lsof won't do that. Im not sure of any tool that could actaully do that. But between top and lsof you can work out what processing are running and what sockets are currently open. If its a problem with daemon logging going crazy you should be able to see in the logs.

 

[skiba]

does iostat exist on hpux? it won't show filenames but should give you an idea of when disk usage is intensive and you should be able to narrow it down from there? maybe it's ioscan on hpux?

 

[lloydsj]

does iostat exist on hpux? it won't show filenames but should give you an idea of when disk usage is intensive and you should be able to narrow it down from there? maybe it's ioscan on hpux?

yes iostat is on hpux.... but as you will know it just shows which disks are getting hammered. Which i've already been looking at... but what i now want to do is find out which are the files that are getting all the read/write on those disks. (i.e. which file accesses are the ones that are causing the high disk usage).

Cheers.

 

[bitslice]

this is on AIX,

(run from \)

find . -type f -mtime -1 -print > \logmodtime.txt


it'll log the files modified in the last day,
if there is any unexpected ones, then you can go look at their timestamps


sorry, best I can do
me=unix noob

.

 

[lloydsj]

find . -type f -mtime -1 -print > \logmodtime.txt
.

Yeah, ive done that before cheers. It gives me a list of files edited in the last 24 hours as suggested, but it still doesn't show what im after finding out.

 

[zetec452]

Ignore

 

[bitslice]

Yeah, ive done that before cheers.

s'OK,
I was hoping someone could tweak it to show a file that was modified in the last few seconds.
would that be relevant ?


ie find . -type f -amin -1 -print

but amin is not an option on my version of AIX

---
surely if you then know which files are being accessed every minute, then that tells you which ones to look at more closely ?
---
I think to pinpoint the user on AIX, I would need to set up system accounting
---

it's not a paging problem is it ?
.

 

[memyselfandi]

If you're licensed for it glance (with the -i switch) will give you disk io by filesystem and indicate the PID of the process which is currently doing the most io at the bottom of the screen.

lsof can then be used to see what files that process is accessing.

Tim