Table of Contents

• iostat

iostat reference

iostat -xmdz 1
#       |||| +- repeat every 1 second
#       |||+─ omit output for any devices for which there was no activity during the sample period
#       ||+- display the device utilization report
#       |+- display statistics in megabytes per second
#       +- display extended statistics

Device:  rrqm/s   wrqm/s     r/s     w/s    rMB/s    wMB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await r_await w_await  svctm  %util
xvdf       0.00  2934.00    0.00 2000.00     0.00    48.69    49.86     2.59    1.30    0.00    1.30   0.50  99.60

rrqm/s, wrqm/s

read/write requests merged per second

r/s, w/s, rMB/s, wMB/s

reads/writes (throughput) per second

avgrq-sz

Average request size in sectors (512 bytes) In general if this number is below 16 (16 * 512 bytes = 8KB). If this number is low (<50), you are going to be IOPS limited. If it's high (>100), you are likely to be bandwidth limited.

avgqu-sz

Average queue size. Indicates how many requests are queued waiting to be serviced. If avgqu-sz gets big (>30), your application is submitting more requests per secondthan the volume can handle.

await

Average wait in milliseconds. The average amount of time the requests that were completed during this period waited from when they entered the queue to when they were serviced. This number is a combination of the queue length and the average service time. This is one of the most important metrics.

svctm

Service time in milliseconds. While await counts the whole wait time of requests, svctm counts only the time consumed by device. As Linux doesn't measure the actual service time, so svctm is just approximation. Consider await more importantly.

%util

Percentage of CPU time during whchi I/O requests were issed to the device. High %util doesn't always say that there is an overload. If the device serves requests in parallel, this value can constantly be high.