There are probably thousands of articles on the Internet about
disk statistics in Linux, what various columns mean, how accurate
the information is, and so on. I decided to attack the problem
from a little bit more practical side. Hopefully this will be
just the first of many future posts on identifying various I/O
related performance problems on a MySQL server.
Linux exposes disk statistics through /proc/diskstats.
However the contents of this file isn’t something anyone can
understand quickly. It needs a tool to transform the information
into something human readable. A tool that is available for any
Linux distribution is called iostat and comes with
sysstat package.
How to access and read I/O statistics
Usually you want to call iostat one way:
iostat -xkd <interval> <block device>
The interval should typically be one second as it is the …
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