xiostat: accurate Linux disk IO statistics

Update, September 21 2011: xiostat is now obsolete. Please use MXiostat instead. The remainder of this page is retained for historical purposes.

The Linux iostat command turns out to not report completely accurate and complete IO statistics (covered in more detail here). xiostat.py is the replacement program I wrote to give us a faithful recounting of the actual kernel disk IO statistics. It works on 2.6 kernels and Red Hat's 2.4 kernels that have disk IO stats added (such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3).

So that's: xiostat.py

Usage: xiostat.py [-q] [-c COUNT] [DEV [DELAY]]

Since the default device to report on is sde1 (for peculiar local reasons), the DEV argument is in practice mandatory. -q omits the field headers that are printed every 24 lines or so, -c is how many iterations to stop after (by default xiostat.py runs forever), and DELAY is how many seconds to delay between each iteration (default 1).

Feedback, fixes, etc, can be directed to ChrisSiebenmann.

Note that one significant difference between xiostat and iostat is that xiostat only reports on a single device at a time. While this could be fixed with more work (that I don't have time for right now), right now if you want to monitor multiple devices at the same time you need to run multiple copies of xiostat.

It's know to work on 2.6 kernels (and thus Debian Sarge, Fedora Core 2+, etc) and Red Hat Enterprise 4; it should work on RHEL 3 as well, but I don't have a machine to test on. It will not work on 2.4 kernels unless they have the Red Hat disk statistics patch.

xiostat fields

Xiostat prints almost all fields in amount per second, regardless of how long the DELAY is set for. Time based fields are printed in milliseconds.

Field What
act Instantaneous count of outstanding IO requests right now (not a per second field)
rio Read requests completed.
rmerge Read requests merged into existing requests
rsect Read sectors submitted
rwait Average time for read requests to complete
rgrp Average sectors per read request
w* As for r* fields, but for writes instead of reads.
agrp Average sectors per request (across both read and write)
aveq Average queue size, ie the average number of outstanding IO requests
await Average time for all requests to complete (across both read and write)
util Percentage of the time that there was at least one IO request pending.

For fine details, you should read my writeup of what information the kernel makes available.

A note about the source code

In the process of the work that caused me to write xiostat.py, we wound up adding some extra kernel statistics to monitor actual device service and activity times (to a Red Hat Enterprise 3 kernel). The remnants of code to handle these additional fields are still in the current xiostat.py, because I haven't had the energy to clean it up and validate the changes. Hence mysterious mentions of fields like 'rduse' and 'waveq'.

There is also some experimental code to parse /etc/fstab and the 2.4 LVM information to try to let people specify filesystems instead of devices. I don't believe this works well on 2.6, so you don't want to use it.

Copyright

GPL. It's not explicitly labeled as such in the code, due to lack of time et al. (Someday I will fix this, but not today.)


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Last modified: Wed Sep 21 16:12:28 2011
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